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Chastity an endangered species

2012-02-01T18:43:00.000+08:00

I’M AFRAID we need to launch a rescue operation for the virtue of chastity that now seems to be in the brink of extinction. Just look around and signs are aplenty pointing to this disturbing phenomenon.

Many people nowadays do not know anymore the true nature and meaning of our sexuality. That it is meant to be integrated to our person, subject to reason, faith and charity, and placed into the dynamics of our calling to love and to enter into communion with God and with others is hardly known, much less pursued and lived.

Instead, there’s rampant abuse of sexuality, treating it merely as a toy to play with, a purely personal property completely detached from the law of God who is its creator and our duties to others to whom it is oriented.

Cases of adultery, masturbation, fornication, pornography, prostitution, rape and homosexual acts are piling up. The environment is now so charged with eroticism that even talk shows on radio, TV, not to mention the Internet, copiously drip with sexual innuendoes. From time to time, of course, sexual crimes explode into public notice.

Even songs playing on radio have lyrics with naughty, risqué double meanings. Condoms are now such a common commodity that they are sometimes used as balloons. People’s language, of course, is deteriorating to vulgarities and profanities.

No one seems to talk about chastity nowadays, neither in public nor in private. It’s hardly taught in schools and many families find it awkward to talk about it. People, especially the young, are pretty much left on their own to grapple with their issues with sexuality.

For a variety of reasons, public authorities many times fail to create or even defend an atmosphere conducive to chastity in society. There’s incompetence, indifference and neglect, if not outright error that usually tends to actively spread out, not contented with keeping it private.

They often get confused with how to resolve the apparent conflict between freedom of expression and artistic freedom, on the one hand, and the requirements of chastity, modesty and public morals, on the other.

Complicating the whole issue is the presence of many public figures—stars, celebrities, media luminaries—who openly promote what may be termed as “alternative lifestyles.” They now happen to count on immense support from powerful institutions that promote safe sex, sex ed, so-called gay rights, same-sex marriage, etc.

Yes, while we need to have a high level of tolerance and avoid unnecessary discrimination in society, we should also realize more deeply that we have to be clear about what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. These distinctions are getting blurred.

Truth is we need to actively promote this virtue of chastity. This cannot be considered as a purely private and personal affair. This has to be openly talked about, and tackled also in intimate, personal consultations, because it involves something very basic in our personal lives and in society. It’s a human necessity.

Chastity is actually a very beautiful, positive and relevant virtue, contrary to what some people say that it is inhuman, restrictive and unnecessary. It affirms the true dignity of our sexuality. Chastity places our sexuality at the service of true love and freedom, extricating it from the deceptive clutches of selfishness.

Our problem is that often our sexuality is held captive in the biological and hormonal urges that start in our adolescent years. Many people fail to outgrow this stage, unable to see the whole picture into which our sexuality has to be viewed and lived.

We have to find ways to tackle this concrete issue that everyone of us faces. Our problem is that we are often held back to talk about this because of some natural sense of shame and modesty. This is where some pro-active approach should be made. We cannot wait until the young ones especially bring the topic up. They most likely will not bring it up.

We have to be clear and ready to give the means to develop chastity. First the supernatural means of asking for God’s grace in humility, praying, recourse to the sacraments, devotions to our Lady, etc., and then the human means of work, avoiding idleness, training in the self-mastery of one’s urges.

We have to see to it that the pursuit of chastity is done in the clear context of loving God and others. It cannot prosper outside of that context. And therefore, we need to look into people’s spiritual lives. Chastity is never solely a matter of techniques. It has to be a lifestyle, a stable culture.

Malice and mercy

2012-01-30T22:27:00.001+08:00

BECAUSE of our spiritual nature, because we are free and can choose and determine the course of our life, and a host of other becauses, we are able to turn our life north or south, to rise to the heights of glory or to plunge into the depths of ignominy.

Our dignity is of utmost caliber, nothing less than persons created in the image and likeness of God and made, in fact, as God’s children through the gift of grace. But it’s also by the same token that we can fall far deeper than any creature can into utter meanness. “Corruptio optimi pessima,” the corruption of the best is the worst.

That’s why there’s heaven and hell, eternal bliss and endless damnation. Both truths of faith reflect the best and the worst in us.

Such is our condition. We should be constantly aware of this double-edged possibility that can befall us, so we can be properly prepared and skilled to handle it. Truth is there are moments in our life when we seem to walk on a tightrope between good and evil. We should not be surprised by this situation.

Those who are more gifted in life—in intelligence, talents, looks, fame, wealth, health, power, etc.—usually find themselves with more temptations and trials both in terms of quantity and complexity. Yet, everyone is offered a choice where to turn to.

We have to reassure ourselves that there’s always hope, and that the means for us to make the right choice are always there. As St. Paul once said, “where sin has abounded, the grace of God has abounded even more.” (Rom 5,20)

Yes, our capacity to sin can be endless. If our first parents, Adam and Eve, still in their original condition of sinlessness and excellence, managed to sin, you can imagine how easy it would be for us to fall, since our present condition is much more vulnerable to sin.

Besides, our armory to further this capability to sin to its extreme of malice can be richer. If our fallen first parents only resorted to hiding behind a fig leaf and making petty excuses, we now have far plentier ways of hiding and offering alibis. We can even dare to rebel openly against God, doing so with conviction and indifference.

We should therefore acknowledge our sinfulness and our huge potential to sin. St. John once said, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 Jn 1,8) This is the first step—to acknowledge it—so we can take the necessary succeeding steps.

We need to be constantly on guard against our weaknesses and the temptations both inside and outside us. We have to remember that our worst enemies can be our own selves, and the trickiest temptations can spring from our best endowments. So, let’s not be naïve.

We have to learn how to do battle with them, always coming up with strategies that would clearly identify our specific enemies at the moment (laziness, lust, pride, envy, etc.) and the spiritual and moral weapons we need.

We need to develop virtues and good practices, filling our mind and heart with good thoughts and desires, engaging our faculties with their proper objects. We have to avoid idleness and a selfish loneliness that cuts us from God and from others. Even in our solitary moments, we have to think always of God and others.

Thus, it would be good if we can formulate an effective plan that includes the appropriate acts of piety—prayers, continuing formation, sacrifice, sacraments, etc.—so that we don’t face the day unprepared and ridiculously exposed to our spiritual enemies.

We need also to bolster our faith in God’s everlasting mercy. Our Lord always forgives. He gives special and immediate attention to sinners. Remember the story of the woman caught in adultery and the repentant thief. He didn’t go through complicated investigations. He just forgave them!

He himself taught us to forgive others not only seven times but seventy times seven, meaning always. In fact, God wants us to forgive others so we can be forgiven.

Let us also remember the steps to attain forgiveness and to be able to forgive others—regularly doing examination of conscience, making many acts of contrition reparation, going to frequent confession.

Blessed John Paul II once said it is God’s mercy that limits our capacity to sin. So, it’s very important not only to be familiar with, but also to savor this divine mercy given to us so abundantly.

Basis for our unity and equality

2012-01-28T17:26:00.001+08:00

I SUPPOSE everyone is interested in unity and equality, perhaps more of the latter than the former, though one cannot be without the other.

My feminist friends, for example, would want women to have equality with men. The poor want to be treated with a certain sense of equality with the rich. Same with the young with respect to the oldies, the weak and handicapped with the strong and powerful, etc. It’s a matter of basic justice.

We cannot deny the fact that aside from the uniqueness of each one of us, we form different groups and fall into different classes, kinds, types and categories, based on different criteria—beliefs, culture, profession, to mention a few.

Yet there is also the undeniable fact that despite our many differences, we want to be together in a functioning unity and equality. That’s why we have doctrines, rules and laws, courts, governments and other structures to attain this goal.

We just have to make sure all these human instruments are properly grounded. Which also means they have to be properly driven and oriented, since these requirements actually go together, though they don’t come automatically. We have to work on them.

This can happen only when our pursuit for unity and equality is based on our living union with God shown in obeying the truths he revealed to us about ourselves and living them, of course, in charity. Again, truth and charity always go together if either one has to be authentic, not fake or plastic. Otherwise, we would have a flying elephant.

Our problem is that we often get contented only with our own ideas, ideologies, laws and some consensus to achieve this ideal. Do you think these would be enough? Unity and equality among men and women, for example, just cannot be achieved simply with our human means. We can say, “tell it to the Marines,” when one would dare to affirm so. Imagine when we have to consider the complexities of pursuing social justice.

Though our human doctrine, ideologies and laws have a role to play, they are nothing if they are not inspired or infused with the living spirit of God, who is the source of all unity and equality. This should be made clear to everyone.

We would just be giving appearances, many times deceptive appearances, of unity and equality, when things are not done in the context of a living relation with God. The Trinitarian nature of God—three persons in one God, equal in dignity and in eternal relation with one another—is the pattern of the unity and equality proper to us.

This is just but to be expected, since we are made in the image and likeness of God, and with grace, made children of his, meant to participate in the very life of God. We should never forget this piece of fundamental truth so indispensable in our life here on earth!

Christ, the son of God who became man to give us the fullness of divine revelation, has affirmed this truth when he said in his prayer to his Father: “Holy Father,” he said, “keep them in your name whom you have given me, that they may be one as we also are.” (Jn 17,11) This is the famous “ut unum sint” line of our Lord.

We can only become one and equal with one another in Christ, in spite of or because of our differences. This is what St. Paul said in this regard: “For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office; so we being many, are one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another.” (Rom 1,4-5)

We need to meditate deeply on these words for in them is contained the very germ of our unity and equality among ourselves. These are no mere words, if approached with faith and piety. They are the living truth that comes from God, effective words depending on how consistent we are with our faith.

Our problem usually is that we tend to refrain from making a theological understanding of our life. We prefer to stay in the “safe and comfortable” vision of life, guided only by common sense, or our reasoning based on our sciences, technology and our so-called democratic way of life.

We need to expand our grasp to reality by being guided mainly by faith and an authentic relationship with God, because only then can we truly satisfy our longing for unity and equality.

The Good News about our body

2012-01-20T15:21:00.000+08:00

THEOLOGY is, of course, still a toxin, a foreign body in the minds of most people, including our leaders in the different fields like business, media and politics, even if they profess to be quite religious and have no qualms showing it off.

This is sad, simply because if we realize that we are not just purely material beings, nor simply rational, but that we are also actually spiritual beings with a supernatural goal, then there is no doubt that we need to be guided by faith, that we actually have to do theology in our daily affairs.

It can be granted that many people know this truth in theory. It’s however a very different story in practice. Many are not guided by faith. They simply rely on reason at best, if not, by other lower human faculties and powers, like feelings, emotions, passions, gut feel, etc.

The common phenomenon is that many still cannot make their faith abidingly functional, even if in theory they profess it. There is still no unity of life, no consistency between faith, reason and the other human powers. Many still do not know how to get their act together.

This is one of the big challenges of our time. We have to find ways to overcome the awkwardness, the inability to exercise our faith or to do theology in our human affairs. We have to find ways to neutralize and dominate the antibodies that seem to render us immune and insensitive to the practical consequences of faith.

Pursuing this goal obviously involves a process, a going through of several stages. This is part of our human condition, even if faith, being a supernatural gift, can transcend the usual human requirements. We need to study, but first, we need to have that faith put in human terms also for us to be able to study and hopefully assimilate it.

That is why it is good news that the late Pope, now Blessed, John Paul II developed the theology of the body to give us a clear idea and guideline about a subject that is often taken for granted or considered not as important as studying the dynamics of our spiritual life. This is a new frontier that many of us still have to cross.

Here lies not only the astounding novelty but also the true significance of this part of theology. The theology of the body recovers the original value and role played by our body, and everything else material and earthly, in our life. A quick look at our human history clearly shows how the truth about our body has been awfully distorted.

This theology of the body makes us see that our flesh is organically linked to our spiritual and supernatural character of our life. While distinct, it cannot be separated from our integral human nature and condition, from our beginning and end, and from the plan and purpose God our Father and Creator has for us.

It is mainly based on the undeniable truth that our body also has been created by God, and when it turned sinful, it has been redeemed by no less than God’s Son and Word becoming flesh.

This theology would certainly deepen and broaden our understanding of our life, and would make us more sensitive to the duties and responsibilities we have toward our body. We have so far been neglectful or ignorant of this part of our responsibilities, and of course, we suffer the consequences.

We cannot deny that even among many good people—those who exert great effort to follow Christ—severe problems and difficulties have been gripping them in their concern to rein in the often erring workings of their own flesh.

This sad phenomenon is often made worse because it is a subject that many people find hard to talk about. And so it tends to fester. Many people nowadays, once they know about this theology of the body, welcome it as a true gift from God that was articulated well by Blessed John Paul II.

We should try our best to spread this Good News about our body as widely as possible. We can take advantage of our new technologies to do this. This task, to me, is quite urgent, if only to redress a persevering, if quiet, crisis we are suffering in the whole world.

It’s good to know that powerful institutes have been put up mainly in the States and are precisely preaching this Gospel. We need to have some of these institutes in our country too!

Open politics to Christ

2012-01-18T21:22:00.000+08:00

I REMEMBER Blessed Pope John Paul II beginning his pontificate way back in October 1978 with words that have become emblematic of his papacy: “Do not be afraid. Open, I say open wide the doors to Christ.”

Those were bold words thrown as a challenge to a world that has gone far from God, from religion, from morality. Thanks to God, we can say that since then, big strides have been made in different areas of human life.

Still, we have to understand that allowing Christ to enter more and more into our lives is an ongoing affair. It never stops. We can never say we have enough of Christ. We need to continue opening doors, big and small, external and internal, to Christ.

Of particular interest to us now is the area of politics. The way it’s done and practiced here and abroad, we can definitely say that Christ is still ostracized, considered as a bother, irrelevant, useless, a persona-non-grata.

This is unfortunate, since in the range of our human affairs, politics occupies a very important and crucial position. It’s about how we organize and govern ourselves as a people, a state, a nation. It’s about how we are pursuing our common good that definitely is not only material, but also spiritual, given our nature and condition.

But so far, politics seems to be understood only as the art of acquiring power and keeping it as long as possible, of dominating and controlling others, of amassing more wealth and influence over others.

That it’s a most noble way of serving others is often forgotten. That it necessarily involves sacrifice and heroism and utter self-giving is hardly known. If there’s an appearance of service, it for sure is merely a mask and a convenient excuse for the pursuit of self-interest.

In pursuing these twisted ends, it seems that politics is played as if God, religion and morality have no place. It becomes an arena of sheer brute human cunning that knows no limits as to what can be done. It becomes a magnet of deceit, envy, hatred, revenge, violence, pride, arrogance, greed, etc.

The exercise of freedom in politics seems to be of the anything-goes type. The only constraints would be the obvious one of not getting caught and of complying at least to the formal and external parts of law—legalism—but not its spirit. Even the big demands of morality, let alone the finer points, are thrown away.

Charity? I get the impression many politicians think it’s not possible to live charity in politics. I get the impression that many politicians think that to be effective in politics, one has to bury charity six feet under the ground. Rather, they feel they need to deepen their skills in being nasty, mean and wily.

In the madness of it all, some politicians fall to such an extreme form of self-righteousness that they would have no qualms using the name of God, quoting Bible passages, to advance their own selfish designs. They tend to paint their opponents as all evil and themselves as no evil at all.

We need to correct this anomaly urgently, since given its effects on us, it can indeed be a flowing wellspring either of good or evil things.

We need to allow Christ to enter politics. Those directly involved in it should realize that given the nature and character of politics, they have to be strong and firm in their spiritual and moral life. Otherwise, they just bet swallowed up the monster.

Christ humanizes politics and politicians. Christ sets their proper standards. The fine points of Christianity are not meant to hinder politics, but precisely to purify it and to protect it from falling into the grip of the devil’s game, to which it is very vulnerable.

Christ certainly demands from politicians that they undertake constant personal conversions, assiduous study and development of their political skills in monitoring developments, in dialoguing, consulting and consensus-making, in making prudent decisions and implementing them.

Christ would certainly enlighten us as to what would constitute our proper and integral development. This has been the subject of many opinions, theories, ideologies and systems. But without Christ, these ideas just won’t have the proper spirit to bring us to our authentic end.

Christ would make us see the big picture without neglecting the small details and the constitutive parts. He will teach us the ways of prudence, and ultimately of love, that would include precisely its difficult part—what to do with mistakes, opponents, failures, etc.

Let’s open politics to Christ!

Simplicity and humility

2012-01-16T20:57:00.000+08:00

THIS is our continuing need. Let’s never be derailed from that focus. All throughout our life, we need to build up and protect our simplicity and humility, since these virtues engage our mind and heart always on God and on others, and not simply on our own selves.

This is the danger we have ever since we started to be aware of who we are, what we have and what we can do. In short, our dignity and our powers. We can easily be overtaken by pride and arrogance, that trend to self-centeredness and self-absorption, whose practicality is nothing compared to the venom they leave behind.

Simplicity and humility are not really so much about who we are, what we have and what we can do. They are not so much about how to behave or what to wear. Though they surely have consequences and implications in these matters, they refer more to where we give our mind and heart to.

Are they with God and others, or are they simply revolving around ourselves? It’s a choice we have to make in every step of our life. It’s a choice that practically defines our life—how we think, how we view and judge persons, things and events.

These virtues always make us realize who and how we are—that we are nothing without God and others, that we are meant from beginning to end to enter and to develop a life of relationship. This is how we have been made and wired, so to speak. We just have to follow that law, that design, otherwise, we harm ourselves and get lost.

Yet these basic, undeniable truths are often taken for granted. The wine of our freedom, God’s gift that makes us image and likeness of him and prepares to be children of his, is so intoxicating we think we can be most ok when we are by ourselves.

We have to be wary of this tendency, exerting all the effort to avoid that mistaken notion, even if it will always look attractive. That’s the reason our Lord always taught us to deny ourselves and carry the cross if we have to follow him, as we should, and not just our own ideas, no matter how brilliant they may be, at least for the moment.

Simplicity and humility make us see things clearly and objectively. They take away the sweet poison that foolishly puts ourselves above and before God and others. They make our reasoning and our loving on the right track, avoiding the sophisms of the complicated persons.

Besides, simplicity and humility give us a natural shield against temptations, our own weaknesses and the wiles of the devil and the world. They give us always a reason to hope and to be optimistic in life.

Being complicated precisely means a person who has been detached from God, the source of all truth and goodness, and who simply relies on his own faculties. In a while, he creates a complex web of false reasoning, biases, rash judgments, etc. He ends up self-righteous.

Simplicity and humility put us in condition to acknowledge the existence of God and his abiding providence. Without them, one simply thinks his life is all what he and he alone makes out of it. In short, it’s all his. He follows his own laws.

And his relation with others would simply be marked by motives of practicality and the like. He seems unable to go beyond that, and to discover the wonderful plan made by God with respect to our relationship with him and with others.

Our true joy and everything that it presumes and implies can only be attained when we follow God’s law regarding relationships. This law cannot be other than to love God with everything we have got, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Later, he perfected this dual law by telling to love one another as he (Christ) loves us.

We have to convince ourselves, using our faith first and then our reason and all that are expected of our human condition (we need to study, to develop virtues, to engage in ascetical struggle, to have recourse to the sacraments, to have ongoing formation), that this divine commandment is really where our true joy is.

It’s where we can expect our authentic development as a person and member of society, and then as a child of God and member of the People of God. We can say goodbye to a myopic view of life, full of anomalies.

It’s all worthwhile to be always simple and humble!

Popular piety revisited

2012-01-11T19:07:00.001+08:00

THANKS to God, we can still count on a rich mine of popular piety in our society. The fiestas in the different cities, towns, barangays and even sitios have their origin and inspiration in religion and people’s faith and devotion to God, Christ, Mary and the saints. These fiestas really transform the atmosphere of the place drastically.

It would seem that this tradition is already so embedded in our culture that no matter what happens in the world and in our country, whether in the tumultuous fields of politics or the economy, a good number of the people still take time to celebrate these fiestas. They are quite serious about them.

There’s a joke, for example, (obviously with a grain of truth) that for Boholanos, the month of May is sacred. Wherever they may be in the world or in the country, they would go home in May because that is the fiesta month of the province. Even those already in heaven would ask permission from St. Peter to come home to Bohol in May!

Some of these fiestas take on a very special character in terms of people’s participation, peculiar expressions of piety and impact on society. I’d like to mention a few—Manila’s Black Nazarene fiesta, Cebu City’s Sto. Nino feast with the accompanying Sinulog, the feast of Our Lady of Penafrancia in Bicol.

All these displays of public piety should be understood as a living thing involving an interplay of divine intervention and human correspondence. They are not purely social phenomena. As such, they have to be properly guided and developed by Church authorities, and not simply left for all sorts of factors and elements to define them along the way.

That’s the reason why the Vatican issued in 2001 a Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy. One of its sections talks about “Evaluation and Renewal” (no. 12), precisely because these manifestations of public piety need to be purified and set on the right track for their proper development and path to Christian maturity and perfection.

It cannot be denied that there are serious threats that can compromise the authenticity of people’s piety. Accusations of superstition and fanaticism, of commercialization and politicalization of religious events, etc., just would not emerge without some shred of basis.

That’s why Church leaders should be actively and closely monitoring the developments in this area. It’s not just a matter of vetoing certain practices immediately and automatically applying penalties without considering the real situation on the ground.

For example, not celebrating the fiesta Mass in places where some disco parties, Miss Gay and Bikini Open shows are held is, I think, a bit senseless, because that penalty most likely would be punishing the wrong people, since the people who want to have Mass are those who usually do not go to these said events.

Such penalty is like a sword of Damocles that is never a good motive for people to behave according to Christian moral standards. It’s like blackmailing them without giving due effort to understand or to do apostolate with those who may have ideas and practices different from those of the Church.

There are many cases that need to be re-examined. That’s why it’s good to take a look at the guidelines given by the Vatican directory on popular piety and apply them persistently even if slowly and, especially at the beginning, awkwardly. Of course, we need the competent Church personnel, properly trained and motivated, to do this.

Among the criteria mentioned in the Directory for evaluation and renewal of popular piety is the “anthropological spirit” which is something to be really mastered by those who have the responsibility in upholding the true essence of popular piety.

This has something to do with having a good understanding of what would comprise as essential in humanity and Christianity as it impacts with the varying and changing factors of time, place, culture, sensibilities, etc.

This is a very tricky, dynamic task that certainly needs an interdisciplinary approach and skills in continuing dialogue, consultation and implementation. But it’s worth all the effort and the sacrifice involved.

We need to think of the future, of how the current state of popular piety that we enjoy can cope with the changing times and attitudes of people. For sure, the Holy Spirit will always do his part, but he will always need our cooperation. Remember that everything in our life, including our public piety, is a joint venture between God and us.

Let’s be forward-looking in our devotions and public piety!

Handling self-righteousness

2012-01-09T19:10:00.000+08:00

WE have to be wary of this very tricky, subtle spiritual disease. It can come to anyone of us. It usually takes advantage of our natural inclination to seek the truth, the good and the beautiful in life—in short, to be right in life—and corrupts that inclination. It’s so blinding it can even take on the appearance of sanctity.

Most prone to this illness are those with some special endowments in life, be it intelligence, talents, wealth, fame, power, health, beauty, etc. When all these gifts are not clearly grounded and oriented toward God, the source of all righteousness, the problem starts.

The problem festers when one continues to simply be guided by his own ideas of what is right and wrong, then falls to begin rationalizing and justifying wrong things until he comes out with complicated ideologies and systems that are openly opposed to God’s laws.

Self-righteousness is precisely when one derives his goodness from his own self, and not from God. It shows itself in many ways: quick to judge, brand people and condemn, slow to understand others and to forgive, not wanting to be corrected, being highly opinionated and wanting to have the last word always, to dominate others, etc.

That’s why, philosophers and theologians, clerics, teachers and leaders in the different fields of human affairs, be it in the Church or in business or politics or media or sports or the academe, etc., should never let go of their duty to be humble and to find ways to make humility always grow and deepen, because that’s the antidote to pride and conceit, the very virus of self-righteousness.

St. Paul, for example, keenly aware of his high dignity and responsibility as an apostle, highlighted the indispensability of humility. “My speech and my preaching was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the showing of the Spirit and power.” (1 Cor 2,3)

He echoed this sentiment a number of times in his epistles. And at one point he expressed the reason for this sentiment. “The foolish things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the wise. And the weak things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the strong…” (11 Cor 1,27)

That’s why he gloried in his weakness. “It’s when I’m weak that I am strong.” And, “If I must glory, I will glory of the things that concern my infirmity.” (2 Cor 11,30) We should never think we are something, since everything good that we have comes from God. The only thing we can contribute on our own—without God—is evil, is sin.

We have to be most careful when we start to use our reasoning. Reason without faith and charity—in short, reason without God—is very dangerous. We can deftly use reason by citing all sorts of proofs, arguments, evidence, examples, doctrine and principles, stats, but if it is not inspired by faith and charity and delivered in humility, then it easily becomes a tool of pride, envy, hatred, revenge, deceit, etc.

Reason and truth should always be given in charity—“veritas in caritate,” as we have been reminded in an encyclical of Pope Benedict quoting St. Paul. It’s actually charity, the very essence of God (Deus caritas est), that gives reason and truth their true life and purpose, their living substance.

Without charity, they freeze, they become rigid, unable to adapt to the vital flow of the different situations of persons and events. Without charity, their beauty and power remain in the externals, their effects not thoroughly and consistently good.

Thus, even the doctrine of our faith has to be made alive through charity. Remember that the devil also quoted the Scripture to tempt Christ. We can fall in that predicament of self-righteousness if we use doctrine without charity. This has happened many times, especially among theologians and supposedly good and holy people.

Without charity, reason and truth would fail to distinguish between the person and the acts. They would not know how to deal with sin and the sinner, their sense of justice goes without mercy, more penal in character than medicinal, more divisive than constructive. Just look at the political squabblings in the media. Many bright guys without charity!

We need to be vitally united with God through prayer, sacrifice, the sacraments, deepening in the doctrine of our faith, development of virtues, etc.—all of these together—to make our reason and truth share in the very wisdom and life of God and avoid that vicious self-righteousness.

Looking for God in the big things

2012-01-08T23:04:00.001+08:00

IF we have to look for God in our personal and individual capacity, then we have to look for him in our social and public life and activity as well. If we have to look for him and do our best to do his will in our small everyday affairs, then we have to do even more in our big, extraordinary issues.

We need to be reminded of this basic truth as we now live in a world that is increasingly globalized economically, politically and technologically. We cannot allow this fundamental need of our lives to be taken for granted.

Many false reasons are often presented to explain why God, faith and religion should be kept private and personal. Among them we can cite the thinking that since we are living in an increasingly multi-cultural world, we have to be tolerant and should just keep quiet about things spiritual and supernatural.

There’s also the belief that moral and spiritual considerations would just hamper our freedom and autonomy, our creativity and practicality. Many people, even the leading men and women in the fields of politics, business, technology, etc., consider any reference to God in their work as a hindrance, a danger or an embarrassment.

We need to explode these myths since, aside from having no basis, they actually pose a great danger to our culture and civilization. Nothing could make us more tolerant and open-minded of the world’s multi-culture, and respectful and enhancing of freedom, autonomy, creativity and practicality than a functional and living relationship with God.

We need to remember that our capacity to be tolerant and our endowments of freedom, autonomy, creativity and practicality are all gifts from God. They are not just products purely of our own making. They need to be lived and practiced in and with God always, and not just depending on our own ideas and theories, no matter how brilliant.

For sure, there are problems and difficulties in putting God always into the picture, but these do not detract from the fact that we have the duty to actively look for God in all our human affairs, big and small.

Problems and difficulties there will always be. We just have to find ways to solve or resolve them. They are not meant to stop us from doing what we ought, but rather to spur us more to action. But what is needed is first of all to dismantle that unspoken practical atheism or agnosticism that’s afflicting many of us.

This is the real problem besetting us, made worse by the fact that we often do not talk about it, and so it grows and worsens, it festers in a quiet but most effective way.

We need to tighten our life of faith and religion, our relation with God, for that is the basis of the way we live and go about our earthly affairs, the way we treat others and react to problems, the way we pursue our dreams and face the consequences of our actions, both good and bad, both the successful ones and the mistakes and failures.

We should never dare to live by ourselves alone, relying only on our own devices, our own powers, no matter how they may seem to be impressive. This way of life is like putting ourselves in an ocean in a storm, riding a puny and badly-equipped boat.

So in this regard, it would be good that in every step of our pursuit for progress and development in all fields of human endeavour, be it in business, politics or technology, we should deliberately see how our actions, inventions, discoveries, etc., bring us closer to God and to one another, how they foster more charity and solidarity, etc.

We should never take this crucial part of our human activities for granted, presuming that everyone would just be guided properly on his own. There has to be an explicit vision of how these developments serve God and others spiritually and morally.

Especially in the field of technology right now, where I am quite amazed at how the new gadgets can do a lot of wonders, benefits and advantages, we need to be clearly guided about them, because the possibilities for abuse and for doing graver evils with them are also aplenty.

There should be some instructions and reminders of how to use them for the greater glory of God and for real service to mankind, instead of making them tools for self-centeredness. The young ones, prone to confusion, especially need this guidance.

Singing and dancing piety

2012-01-06T16:08:00.000+08:00

GIVEN our nature and our condition, we have to understand that our piety should not just be a purely spiritual affair. It should also be expressed in the flesh, with our senses—eyes, ears, touch—helping in developing and sustaining it.

We can readily see this in our natural filial piety toward our parents, for example. We have all sorts of practices and customs to express that piety. We kiss our parents or make “mano po” every time we arrive or leave home. We keep their pictures in our wallets or in our rooms. We just don’t keep our love and respect for them in the mind.

Our piety has to correspond as much as possible to the fullness of our nature and condition. That correspondence will make our piety more genuine, abiding and effective. That will also help protect us from the danger of temptations, distractions, sins and scandals.

Especially these days, when our senses are constantly bombarded with sensual images and messages, with all kinds of vulgarities and profanities, it is urgent that we deliberately train our senses to be actively engaged with the proper object of our life.

And that can only be God and that we learn how to love properly through them, not allowing our love to deteriorate to merely animal urges. We have to understand that things enter us ordinarily through the senses first, and that therefore the proper education of our senses comprises one of the more immediate needs of our times.

Of course, we have to learn how to develop this particular aspect of our piety. For sure, it should not just be a purely external affair, done more for show or appearance. It has to be vitally united to the convictions of our faith. Our senses should be connected to our reason and to our faith.

That’s why we have to pray hard and to importune our Lord to give us more grace, more strength and light, so our senses can function properly. For those who find it hard to pray, then let’s pray for them, and wage a continuing apostolate of doctrine and catechesis.

If we ourselves find it hard to pray, then let’s ask others to pray for us. In the meantime, let’s try to study the doctrine of our faith assiduously and start to go through the process of learning certain practices of piety.

These practices of piety can be spending time in prayer and meditation, going to the sacraments, especially Mass, communion and confession, participating in some collective means of formation and piety, etc.

No matter how awkward we may feel at the beginning, let’s just try to persevere. Virtues are usually attained by way of discipline and self-denial. In time, we will understand more and appreciate better the wisdom and beauty of these practices.

Also, we should never think lightly of the little things that effectively begin and develop our piety, like looking and admiring pictures and images of our Lord and the saints, saying or singing spontaneous ejaculatory prayers that spring directly from our heart, offering flowers and other signs of devotion, including dancing, to our Lord and the saints, etc.

Not unusually do little things help in fanning the flame of love alive and bursting. This is something we should always keep in mind, because our tendency is to be fascinated only when big and extraordinary occasions and events come our way.

While there is need to be discreet and natural about these practices given our human condition, we should see to it that we are actually oozing with love and affection for God and the saints.

This is, of course, a personal affair, and so let’s allow our conscience to tell us about the extent and intensity of these practices. It’s in our conscience that we can hear the voice of God, who always intervenes in our life and tells us what and how to do things. It’s there also where we bring our personal considerations to him.

Let’s take advantage of our usual actions to keep our piety alive, like attaching some ejaculatory prayer or pious thought to things like whenever we open or close a door, climb up or down the stair, or when we take a shower or fix ourselves in front of the mirror, etc.

These practices should be second nature to us. With our current general mentality, they may be considered as a little bit exaggerated, but they actually are not. These practices would only show that our soul and our faith are alive and kicking.

The horizon and beyond

2012-01-05T19:01:00.000+08:00

IT’S good that while we’re still at the beginning of the new year, we can take a long, hard look at the horizon, and even beyond, to discern how the future will be, what kind of world we would like to have.

This is a common practice which we should try to sustain and improve, since there are signs people are getting myopic and insular in their view of things. Very few people can talk about having a worldview, in fact. The common reality is that they just live by the day, in a figurative hand-to-mouth existence, their world ending with every sunset.

Looking at the horizon and beyond is a must for us, since we don’t live only in the present, much less, in the past. We are meant for the future, and even beyond time. The reality that we are in is not only temporal nor spatial, but also eternal and spiritual. But that’s saying too much too soon.

The more immediate scenario is that with our present level of technological progress, a level is that ever dynamic and quick changing, our capabilities for innovation, collaboration and creativity have gone ballistic.

This has changed our world drastically, and of course, we have changed our outlooks and lifestyles. I, for one, even if terribly technologically challenged, feel more empowered and enabled because a new gadget, an android, was given to me last Christmas.

Of course, my case is very simple and even “primitive” if compared to others who are riding the crest of this technological tsunami. But with what I have received, I discover that I can have a veritable large library at the tip of my finger, I can go places, call and see friends abroad, have the oeuvre of many authors, etc.

Suddenly my world has gone bigger multiple times and in multiple ways. Even in my relatively small world, I can see the tremendous effects of the information technology. In the school where I work, I see simple boys who used to tend cows and goats in the mountains turn into digital wizards with income their parents and grandparents have never seen before.

It’s gratifying to see them attain a certain level of achievement. But I always remind them of the spiritual, moral and apostolic side these dizzying technological developments are supposed to have. We should never allow ourselves to be held captive only by the practical or economic benefits of these things.

Going back to the reality that governs us and that I mentioned earlier, we need to remind ourselves that these earthly achievements, while good and have their proper and important place in our life, are not everything to us. If at all, they are simply means to a much higher end.

They are supposed to bring us closer to God and to one another. If this criterion is not achieved, then we have failed, no matter how brilliant our performance may have been in the technical side and in the other mundane aspects.

Can we say that these amazing new gadget and technologies have made us a better person, a better Christian, more able to establish a more intimate contact with God and with others?

Has our love for God and others, expressed in practical ways, improved? Are we now more aware and more able to meet the requirements of the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity? If not, then we still have to drastically reform our attitudes and vision of things.

In fact, we should be deeply worried when these technologically generated benefits and advantages have not improved our spiritual and moral life, our intimacy with God and our effective and practical communion with others. That situation can be rife for the terrible danger of making us very materialistic and worldly.

We should actively find ways of getting to the spiritual and moral angle of these developments, because our tendency is to be trapped in the worldly and temporal criteria only.

We have to continually examine our conscience and rectify our intentions along the way. We should not take this task for granted, otherwise our spiritual selves would weaken and our carnal egos aroused.

We should be most careful with our spontaneous reactions and impulses, because they tend to be animalistic first, before they become human and Christian. They are like little children, cute but needing a lot supervision.

When we have our spiritual and moral selves in order, then we would be confident we are on the right track toward the horizon and beyond. Otherwise, we’d just be playing games, going nowhere.

Handling temptations

2012-01-04T07:26:00.000+08:00

THOUGH we have to face big issues and bigger challenges this year, especially in the areas of economy and politics, we should never forget to develop and strengthen our personal skills in handling temptations. This concern never goes passé, and it touches a basic, indispensable aspect of our life in all levels.

These days, temptations come to us in the subtlest and trickiest of ways. This can be due, at least in part, to the increased level of sophistication both in people’s thinking and in world development, especially in the area of technology and ideology.

With these developments, temptations can easily come undetected, and sin can be committed in most a hidden way and even easily rationalized. How important therefore it is for us to always grow in humility and simplicity, finding aggressively practical ways to achieve them! If not, we would just be lost.

The healthy fear of God is disappearing. In its place, a most heinous sense of self-importance is dominating. The criteria to determine what is good and bad have become blurred. They have gone almost completely relativistic and subjective, declaring total independence from any absolute and objective rule or law.

Some psalms can give us helpful ideas on how to handle temptations.

- “Surrender to God, and he will do everything for you.” (Ps 36)

- “Turn away from evil and learn to do God’s will. The Lord will strengthen you if you obey him.”

- “Wait for the Lord to lead, then follow in his way.”

Truth is, we always need God in our battle against temptations. We should disabuse ourselves from the thought that with our good intentions and our best efforts, we can manage to tame the urges of temptations.

We cannot! That’s the naked truth about it. We only can if we are with God. And we have to be with him in a strong, determined way, not in a passive or lukewarm way. Do flies flock on a hot soup? No. But they do on a cold or lukewarm soup.

We need to do everything to be with God. Our mind and heart should be fully and constantly engaged with him. We always have reason to do so—at least, we can thank him for what we are having at the moment: health, food, air, work, etc.

We should never take things for granted. Remember that our Lord asked the only leper who returned to him to thank him out of the ten who were cured, where the other nine were. Our Lord expects us to thank him for everything that he has given us.

From there, let us try our best to figure out what his will for us is at any given moment. We have to have the sensitivity to ask him, even if we are already doing our duties and responsibilities which are part of his will for us, how what we are doing at the moment is part of his will, of his abiding providence over us.

That kind of mentality helps us greatly in avoiding sin and in keeping our love for him. Just the same, we should not be surprised that in spite of this attitude, temptations still come. Jesus himself was not exempted from temptations.

That’s because temptations also play an important role in our spiritual life. They point to us where we are weak. They encourage us to develop the virtues that correspond to them. They remind us to be humble always and to depend always on God rather than on our powers.

Temptations can come because of one’s temperament, as in if one is passionate yet weak of will. He is not well-balanced and energetic. They also come because one has been reared in love of pleasure or in an atmosphere of pride and envy. They also come because of God’s providential designs.

We have to be ready for them. Always with God’s grace which we have to continually ask, we have to develop the skills and other tricks of our warfare with them. We should learn to ignore them, reject them outright, never entertaining them, and even ridiculing them.

We should learn to pray more intensely, immerse ourselves more in our work and duties and with greater love. We have to grapple with temptations in the little things, never allowing them get into our big things or close to the heart of our spiritual fortress. It might be a good idea too to go to confession once temptations come.

Lastly, never to lose hope even when we fall.

Theological life

2012-01-01T17:58:00.001+08:00

WE have just begun a new year with the liturgical celebration of the solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. In the gospel of the Mass, we are told about the shepherds who went to see the child Jesus simply because they were told by an angel.

They believed and obeyed in all their simplicity, and they were rewarded immensely. As the gospel narrates, they went back, “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, in accord with what had been told them.” (Lk 2,20)

More significantly, we are told that Mary also “treasured all these things (what the shepherds told her) and reflected on them in her heart.” (Lk 2,19)

The elements of being told, then believing and obeying, then treasuring and reflecting on what was told, are prominently bannered in this gospel. They are elements that comprise the nature and character of faith, of what it involves and demands. We need to be familiar with them because they comprise the basic elements in our life.

Our life is actually never just our own project, our own design. It is fundamentally given and directed. It involves a law that has to be followed, a force and impulse that comes from outside before it is made our own. And for sure, it is a force that never ceases to be external to us even if we have already made it our own.

This is a fundamental truth about us that needs to be ventilated more widely, more persistently and creatively, because we tend to forget it or at least to distort it. If only this idea, this piece of basic truth could just be a blurb repeated often on radio and TV or a slogan or motto in schools and offices, I think we would be doing great.

We need to live a theological life, a life continuously fueled and driven by faith, and not just by reason, feelings and instincts. Not even by our sophisticated sciences, technologies and arts.

Our problem is that we are at present succumbing to a rationalist and technological mentality which puts our reason and other human capabilities as the prime defining force of our life.

If not that, then we are stuck with the other extreme, the low end of a lifestyle of bondage, slavery and addiction in drugs, sex, food and drinks. People become so self-absorbed, so dominated by their passions and instincts that not even reason, much less, faith would have any effect.

More than anything else, this challenge is the most important. It may not be the one immediately felt, but it surely is the one that goes together with our ultimate goal in life.

Remember what our Lord said: “What does it a profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?” (Mt 16,26) And that episode of Martha and Mary when our Lord told the busy Martha, “you are troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her.” (Lk 10,41-42)

Both instances clearly show us the priority of prayer over action, faith over reason, the spiritual over the material, the sacred over the mundane. It’s not the latter elements are bad. They just have to be kept in their proper places and fed by their proper nourishment.

Yet, this distinction and relation between these two sets of elements is hardly known nowadays, not to mention, lived. Many of us do not know how to integrate them properly in their ordinary daily lives.

This is where the need to talk, explain and effectively portray the theological life comes to the fore. In fact, it would seem that any talk about theology or anything theological is immediately blocked off or considered as restricted only to some people who may have the heart for it. They don’t realize it has a universal applicability.

There’s certainly an urgent need for the appropriate evangelization and catechesis on this basic point. This should be primarily done in families and schools, with the Church always promoting it.

Of course, more than just talking, what is needed is widespread giving of example, of showing living testimony of the wisdom and practicability of this truth. We need to see many people effectively living this truth, such that a certain appropriate culture and lifestyle would develop in society.

Theological life involves prayer, sacrifice, sacraments, developing virtues, sanctification of one’s ordinary work and duties, apostolate as a necessary consequence of all this, done in all levels of life.

Sizing up the challenges

2011-12-30T15:33:00.003+08:00

EVERY new year poses new challenges. We’ve been through this routine for quite some time now. But I must say that this new year presents to us challenges that are more complex and complicated, more tricky and deadly.

This must be due, at least in part, to the accelerated pace of technological development, as well as a population that is growing not only in number but also in both sophistication, on the one hand, and ignorance, confusion and error, on the other.

Both contrasts and conflicts that are getting sharper, on the one hand, and the subtle process of homogeneizing and uniforming people mindlessly, on the other, are taking place.

I find this combination of factors very intriguing, indeed. Some people can know a lot yet miss the point. Others can know little yet continue to be wise. And now, at the back of our minds, we ask, and who is going to judge who is right and is who is wrong?

There now on seems to be a crisis on what norms and standards to follow these days, what values and in what order they have to be upheld and defended. Many people seem to be guided solely by purely subjective criteria.

Which reminds me of what St. Paul once said: “The spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is judged by no man.” (1 Cor 2,13) It’s an intriguing affirmation that for sure will be questioned, if not rejected, by sceptics, agnostics and atheists.

But I believe in it—it’s the spiritual man, the one vitally connected with God, who knows things objectively. In the end, it’s the kind of spirit one submits himself to that would guide him in his decisions. So I always bat for spiritual formation and development more than anything else, without disparaging the other requirements.

The virtues of prudence and discretion have never been so needed as during these times. The demands of charity have become more nuanced. We have to careful with our rash judgments and our reckless speech.

So many things are just happening in the micro and macro levels of our life, in the personal and social aspects, in the spiritual and moral and the material worlds. Today’s ballistic development in technology actually requires a corresponding radical maturation of our spiritual life. But we can observe hardly any correspondence between the two.

We have to learn how to distinguish and integrate things properly, putting them in their right places, order and hierarchy. This is not going to be an easy task, but neither is it impossible.

We need to learn how to hold our horses and restrain our emotions, moderate our urges, and how to think, judge and reason properly, as well as how to speak and express ourselves with tact and courtesy in spite of our differences.

We have to learn how to dialogue with the different parties on different issues. The more interaction, the better. The more linkages we have among ourselves, the better for us. We have to foster the culture of dialogue.

We need to know more the range and intricacies of the now in-thing of tolerance—in the fields of culture, law, religion, politics, etc., without falling into chaos and disorder, and without forgetting that there are certain things that remain absolute and unchangeable in spite of the constant flux in life.

We need to know more about the scope and limits of our rights—to expression, to privacy, personal and social development, etc. We have to be more sensitive to the fine lines involved in the discretionary part of our laws. This appears to be abused quite openly lately.

As we can see, challenges that pose problems to us are actually opportunities, chances and windows for us to develop the appropriate virtues, attitudes and skills. They provide us with the occasion and the spur to bring our knowledge, wisdom and maturity to the next level. We should never say enough.

Our life here is always on the go. We should never think we know enough, or that our formation has already reached its maximum level. We have to remember that with our spiritual nature, we are oriented toward the infinite. Our capacity to know and to learn, to exercise our freedom, knows no limits, though a certain law governs it.

Let’s always remember that our freedom can go in two ways—either for good or evil, for greater freedom or deeper slavery as when we sink in the world of different addictions which are also noticing these days.

If only

2011-12-28T16:21:00.000+08:00

ENDING a year and beginning a new one usually elicits fond wishes among us. For me, I think I have many, but for now, I simply wish our media people become more human and Christian in our work. At least, that they—we, I include myself—have a deeper sense of ethics, and that we realize we need continuing formation, just like everybody else.

That might be too blunt to say, but that can actually be applied to everybody else, be he in media or not, and of course, myself included. Our humanity and Christianity are always a work in progress.

I just hope that we can be more serious and specific as to how that transformation, that humanization and Christianization can take place. In this task, I think everyone can and should help, can and should contribute whatever he can.

I was thinking that a more feasible and sustainable program of formation for media people that includes not only the technical aspects but also and more so on the ethical aspect, should be put in place. It’s a pity that with all the advances in technology and the profession, we remain largely puerile in our spiritual and ethical life.

You see, casual and random occasions lately provoked in me some intriguing if disturbing thoughts. While having a haircut the other day, for example, I overheard on TV (the set was at my back and above; I could hear it but not see it) things that made me immediately ask myself: Have we gone this far and this low already?

It was what I later learned to be one of our local reality shows. It was kind of investigative and confrontational in format. And I was shocked by what were exposed by a string of gays who openly said they were into regular sex with a young man who was living-in with a girl.

Lurid, almost pornographic details in foul language were mentioned, all impertinent to any ethical goal the show might be presumed to pursue. The interrogations were gossipy in character, creating a voyeuristic atmosphere, personal privacy violated with impunity. Many in the barber shop dropped our jaws in disbelief.

I could not help but suspect that money must be the reason those characters dared to present themselves and tell their stories there. Most likely, the poverty of people is again exploited to satisfy a big untapped market of misplaced curiosity that many people have, all for the sake of ratings.

Mischievous social observers might dismiss the parties involved as our low-lifers who should just be given their fifteen minutes of fame, since, anyway, that would be unavoidable.

But to me that would be inhuman and unchristian. Everyone is a child of God regardless of his defects and sins, and should be loved and helped. We should try our best not to expose to the public things that are not supposed to be known by others, especially if they are scandalous.

The hostess of the show pressured the poor fellow to admit what were claimed by both the gays and the girl, and even by some neighbours. I found it very disgusting, and wondered if anything can be done to police this kind of shows.

Also, while riding in a taxi recently, I heard over the radio the driver was listening to, some running commentaries of the recent floods in Cebu and the unavoidable references to Typhoon Sendong in Mindanao.

When there was a lull because no new data came in or the information were not clear, the commentators tried to fill up their time by dishing out some trivia, like cows can swim for an hour in the sea, being dragged by a pump boat.

No problem, there. But I was just thinking that with the gravity of the situation, could these media men not come out with more meaningful commentaries? I then realized that, of course, these men are lacking in formation. They could not talk about the spiritual and religious significance of the event.

This is a big challenge, since a lot of bias and prejudice prevent many people, including those in media, to see the importance and relevance of spiritual and religious formation in their work. They get contented with the technical and the professional aspects, not knowing that these need to be animated more deeply in one’s spiritual life.

Of course, things cannot be worse than in the political commentaries where a lot of bullying, insulting, all sorts of non-sequiturs are standard fare.

If only we, media people, get serious with our continuing formation...

Keeping the Christmas spirit alive always

2011-12-24T23:28:00.000+08:00

“SHE will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” The Christmas message.

With these few words, the gospel tells us the core reason for our joy in spite of whatever may be our condition and situation in life. Christian life is always a happy life. We should be wary when we find ourselves in the clutches of sadness for a variety of reasons.

We are meant to be happy, because no matter how we may be at any given moment, our Lord is always there to save us. He is bent to bring to completion the wonderful thing God has started in us.

We can, of course, abuse his goodness, his eternal mercy, as many times we have done in the past and for sure will do in the future, but Christ never changes his mind about us. His love is eternal. It’s unshakeable.

We have to learn to love him in return. Love is always repaid with love. This is what Christmas is trying elicit in us. Every time we see the Son of God turn into a baby, defenceless and in total need of our care, let’s bring it to our mind that he’s inviting us to the marvellous, if tortuous, road to love.

It’s love that is meant for us. Everything else is subordinated to it—our pursuit for justice and peace and truth, our concern for development and progress, our interest in the enrichment of our culture, etc.

May we know how to relate everything to love, or to charity, which is another name for love, the very essence of God, whose image and likeness we are. May we know how to inspire and lead everything to love, to God.

This would mean that we have to make an effort. In fact, an effort that should be with us till the end of our life, and till the end of time. Love without effort, without sacrifice, is fake. It would just be for show. A bubble that cannot last.

We have to learn how to engage our mind and heart with Christ. He is never just an idea, nor a historical figure who lived in the past but is only made present in our memory. He is truly alive, here and now. Through faith, hope and charity, we can see and hear him at every moment. This is no fiction. This is real, not virtual.

This is the challenge we have to face—how to keep ourselves alive to Christ, since as far as he is concerned, he is already alive in us. In this, we have to help one another.

We are actually given all the means for this purpose. We have the Church, established by Christ so that his presence and work of redemption and perfection of our creation can continue throughout time.

In the Church, we have the salvific doctrine of our faith, the truths that include mysteries that bring us to him. We have the sacraments that, regardless of their human and natural elements, convey grace if not the very Christ, in body and blood, to us.

We have the living witnesses of holiness through the myriads of saints and holy men and women who have identified themselves unsparingly with Christ. Through them, we get a good idea of how it is to be a true child of God. We will never lack inspiration to give us the needed impulses to go on in spite of whatever.

Yes, we just have to train our mind and heart to focus on our Lord and to beat in synch with the heart of Christ. That is always possible. If it can be done in our human love affairs where we depend more on human means, this definitely can be done in our love affair with Christ who gives us much more powerful means.

How important it is that we know how to develop a lifestyle and culture that spring vitally from this Christmas message and spirit! In our journey of life, we face tremendous trials and challenges. Temptations from within and without abound, and they can truly darken and spoil our outlook.

We cannot underestimate the dangers that lurk at every moment and in every corner of our earthly pilgrimage. We truly need Christ. He is our strength, our light, our cure, our salvation and perfection. Let’s never think we are ok without him.

Again, let’s help one another. We have to keep the Christmas spirit alive always.

When disasters strike

2011-12-20T20:16:00.001+08:00

WE have to be ready spiritually and morally, and not just materially,
socially, politically, etc., when disasters and calamities strike. In
the end, this is really what matters.

This state of preparedness should not be reduced to lower levels,
overtaken by other considerations that, while they may be more
immediate, are not the ultimate and decisive factors.

At the moment, I can discern an unspoken lament over God’s role in
these sad events. Why did God allow Typhoon Sendong to happen? Why did
he let so many people, even innocent children, to die in such a
manner? Why does he want us to suffer?

We have to be ready for the right answers to these questions that
understandably would spring in anyone’s mind and heart. And for this,
let’s not rely on our reasoning alone, but rather on our faith always.
Faith gives us a glimpse of the mind of God with respect to our human
affairs and world events.

And what can we gather from our faith? What we can safely say is that
God allows these disasters to happen, first, because our natural
world has its inherent finite and limited character. And God deals
with the world as with us always respecting the nature the world and
we have.

Sooner or later, our world and everything in it will meet their end.
They will pass away. As an old Nat King Cole song would have it, “The
Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they are only made of clay,
but our love is here to stay.”

That romantic line echoes what our Lord said: “Heaven and earth shall
pass, but my words shall not pass.” (Mt 24,35) It’s a clear indication
that in our earthly affairs, we have to be guided by God’s word, by
the faith God revealed and gave to us, more than just our gut feel, or
our sciences, arts and technologies.

We can then say that disasters and calamities are occasions, reasons
and invitations for us to grow in our faith, to go beyond what our
senses can perceive and intelligence can understand. We need faith!

Thus, in the episode of our Lord with the apostles on a boat tossed
by big waves of a storm, he reprimanded the apostles for their lack of
faith when they in fear roused him from sleep to do something about
the water threatening to sink them. “Why are you fearful: Have you no
faith yet?” he told them. (Mk 4,40)

It’s not that we should not bother our Lord because of our faith. We
can and in fact should bother him when we are threatened by disasters
or are already suffering in them. It’s just that we have to bother him
out of faith, and not out of mere fear. With faith, our Lord can
always calm down the raging seas of our life.

We have to strengthen our faith always. We have to see to it that our
thinking, judging and reasoning are always infused by faith. We should
never allow them to be inspired only by what we see, hear and feel, or
even by what we understand. We have to go by our faith always.

Our earthly condition is made worse by the mistakes and sins we
commit. So, not only do we have to contend with the natural
limitations and weaknesses, but also with the infranatural factors of
these sins and mistakes.

That is why, our Lord taught us how not only to have faith, but also
to be ready to carry the cross with him. The cross is a necessary
element of our faith. It signifies, among other things, the inevitable
suffering we have to undergo in this life because of these natural and
infranatural factors of our wounded human nature.

Knowing how to carry the cross with Christ enables us to face
whatever disaster we can meet in life. Our cross then becomes the
cross of Christ, a suffering that will lead us to our own
resurrection, to our victory over sin, to our own perfection as
children of God.

The cross of Christ, converts our suffering into something redemptive
and perfective of us, and not just painful events of our lives. We
have to assimilate this truth of our faith well.

For this, our Lord wants us to be ready always. “Know this, that if
the good man of the house knew at what hour the thief would come, he
would certainly watch... be you also ready, because at what hour you
know not the Son of man will come.” (Mt 24,43-44)

Selling charity today

2011-12-15T23:42:00.000+08:00

SELLING charity today is like selling rotten fish. You would have more success selling it to a wall. Charity has become a total outcast, hardly known, ignored if not ridiculed by many who are driven only by their so-called sense of justice.

This actually has always been our universal human problem. The root cause is that we pursue justice outside of charity. We make it subject only to our feelings and passions. Or to purely human criteria and laws that cannot go far from the eye-for-an-eye law of Talion, and the tit-for-tat logic of our wiles.

It’s a justice that is mired in legalism, very prone to manipulations, to knee-jerk reactions, to the mob rule dynamics, that cannot free itself from the motive of vindictiveness, and the temptation to gloat over the misfortunes of others, to insult and do all sorts of below-the-belt actuations.

Without charity, it’s a justice that is not an organic extension of divine justice, but its caricature. It covers only a biased part of the over-all picture of true justice, and its main if not sole purpose is to punish and demand restitution, rather than to heal the offender, the sinner.

It considers only the externals, and hardly the inner drama in men’s hearts. Its judgments are therefore based mainly on appearances and impressions. Those who dispense it tend to get hasty and rash in their decisions, often abusing the discretionary part of law.

If possible, what injustice damaged, wounded and killed, justice should repair, heal and resurrect to life. If possible, justice should go against the law of nature, of biology and physics, etc., if only to recover what was lost. It finds it hard to move on without satisfying its lust for revenge.

We have to understand that without charity, justice can go unhinged, and can simply follow the madness of a heart deprived of God who is precisely love, charity. We have to understand that justice is never enough when we deal with people, especially those who may have offended us.

Without charity, our justice can only spring and strengthen our self-righteousness, or that of the world, in its different forms. It’s a justice that cannot understand the workings of grace, the value of the cross, the need for forgiveness and the transcendent providence of God.

Still, no matter how hard it is to sell charity today, we just have to make an act of faith and hope that one day, people will realize we need charity, the charity of God and not just our own version, when we pursue the cause of justice. We just have to run the gauntlet.

Nowadays, the Church, that is, the bishops and priests, gets accused for not doing enough of justice. Some contributors of public opinion claim that the Church gets quiet when one of its own gets involved in some crime, or when it does not make any clear pronouncements on the volatile political issues wracking the nation today.

Aside from mistaking the Church to be composed only of bishops and priests (the Church is hierarchy-clergy-and the laity and consecrated religious men and women all together), they want the Church to follow their kind of earthly justice. They want the Church to shame the suspect or the culprit, for example. They cry for blood.

Perhaps, it’s partly the fault of our Church leaders for not providing concrete Christian guidelines on how to resolve problems and issues when they erupt. They should do this as promptly and as clearly and strongly as prudently possible.

But the truth is all of us, clergy or lay, if we are to be genuine Christians and living members of the Church, should practice justice always within the sphere of the charity of God, revealed and lived by Christ.

Certainly, there are loopholes in how cases of criminal offenses within the Church human structure may be handled, or there can be cases of clerics overstepping their competence and are falling already into partisan politics, etc.

These should be repaired and corrected. But these are not excuses for the Church to pursue justice without charity, just like what these Church accusers want it to do. These accusers are making themselves the final authority of what justice is and how it should be lived.

Granted, to preach about justice within charity may be hard, but definitely it’s not impossible. If we just learn how to be humble, if all of us just try to assume the mind and heart of Christ, as we Christians ought to do, then the ideal can be made real!

Christmas is Christ with us

2011-12-14T18:18:00.000+08:00

JUST in case we forget, Christmas is about Christ born to us. The reminder has become necessary because proofs of the disfiguring of Christmas are increasing.

No less than the Pope reminded us not to be dazzled by the shopping lights of the season but to keep focused on the coming of Jesus Christ, the “true light of the world.”

In a town in the US, a controversy erupted because a group put street signs saying, “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Obviously when messages like that have to be put up in public, there must be something quite wrong in that place.

This was verified when another group precisely kicked up a fuss about it citing legal provisions. Instead, the group wanted their own banner to be hung in the streets, saying:

“At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

Ah, ok. No problem. We have freedom of expression and of consciences. If atheists want their messages publicized, that’s just fine. But let’s not deny believers their right also to show their faith in public, as long as public order is observed.

The legal basis of the group’s complaint is that the “Keep Christ in Christmas” signs were put on public property, which turned out to be false, since they were on private property. But that legal basis raises the questions like, should public property then be devoid of religious signs? Would religious signs already create public disorder?

I’ll leave the people concerned and their public authorities to resolve that issue, but I, frankly, just find the reasons behind the ban of religious signs on public property funny. To me, it’s taking the principle of Church-state separation to its ridiculous conclusions.

Truth is, for Christian believers, we need God, we need Christ, who is the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son of God who became man, to save us, to complete our creation, to give us a way to attain the fullness and perfection of our human dignity.

God is our creator. We, and the universe around us, just did not come to exist on our own, quite spontaneously out of nothing, since from nothing, nothing comes. We are not our own creator.

In our case, since we are creatures of reason and will, our creation by God has to be corresponded to with our reason and will also. Paraphrasing St. Augustine, we can say that if God created us without us, he cannot complete that creation without us. We need to correspond to God’s creation of us. We need to cooperate and bring it to its completion.

In other words, our creation by God is still a work in progress. And our life here on earth is precisely where that “progress” has to take place, where the lifelong drama of our correspondence or non-correspondence to God’s work becomes the ultimate purpose of our life.

This is a truth of faith that is actually meant for everyone, but especially more for believers than for non-believers. For the latter, we need a different tack that uses reason and philosophy more than faith and theology. This piece is addressed more to believers.

We need to be reminded that as Christian believers, we need to be ‘alter Christus,’ if not ‘ipse Christus,’ another Christ if not Christ himself. That’s because Christ is the very pattern of our humanity. We cannot live properly without him. Remember Christ saying, “I am the truth, the way, and the life…”

We become another Christ through God’s grace, but also through our cooperation, when we let our mind and heart, our intelligence and will to get engaged with Christ in the spirit.

In short, we need to assume the mind of Christ, following what St. Paul said that “we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor 2,16) We need to train ourselves for this ideal, realizing that our thoughts should not just be our thoughts, but also those of Christ. The same with our will, our desires, our plans, etc.

Our life is always a shared life with Christ. It’s a reflective life driven by reason and faith, and not just a life animated by the senses and reason alone.

For this, we need humility, otherwise we won’t allow faith to guide our reason. We need to study, develop virtues, so that Christ becomes alive in us, and true Christmas becomes a reality!

Conversing with the world

2011-12-10T22:54:00.000+08:00

“They are in the world…(but) they are not of the world, as I am not of the world.” (Jn 17)

Words of our Lord, with a slight rephrasing, to highlight our relation with the world. We are in it, but we are not of it. We are in the world but we are not supposed to be worldly, since we are not of the world.

This may sound like petty quibbling but it’s actually a crucial fine distinction we have to make. On it depend not only our temporal and earthly destiny but also our eternal one.

We have to remember that the way to our supernatural end passes through our natural world. How we conduct ourselves in our earthly affairs becomes the ticket either for eternal glory or eternal damnation.

Our human perfection, our redemption and salvation, while having its definitive state in heaven, is forged through the things of this world. The supernatural grace, which perfects us and brings us to God, never annuls our human and natural condition. Rather, it always works on it, purifying it and elevating it to the order of God.

In this regard, we have to know how to deal with the things of the world. This is done through a continuing conversation with the world in all its aspects. But in this, we have to strictly follow the example of Christ.

As the Son of God who became man, Christ is the image of God who assumed everything human, except sin. We can derive from that truth that Christ engaged the world in its totality while never forgetting the supernatural mission that he had.

His whole earthly life, his words and deeds, and especially that culminating act of his passion, death and resurrection, indicate his complete immersion of our human and earthly condition and yet transcending it to show us the way to our supernatural end.

This kind of situation involves a combination of active and passive involvement, patience and intolerance, leniency and strictness, openness and firmness, and other sets of apparent contrasting qualities that are unified if one closely follows Christ.

We have to know when to speak and when to keep quiet, when to act and when to wait, when to move and when to stay put.

Since Christ is “the way, the truth and the life” to us, we have to realize that we need to follow or imitate him in his attitude and understanding of the meaning and purpose of our life here on earth.

In our relation with the world, we need to learn how to infuse the Christian spirit in it, never allowing ourselves as much as possible to be dominated by the worldly spirit of materialism, secularism, relativism, and many other isms.

For this the Church has articulated the social doctrine to guide us—clergy, religious and laity—on how to deal with the world in ways proper to each one. Everyone of us, according to his own state and possibilities, should do all he can to engage the world in all its affairs in a Christian way.

Here are some relevant words about the Church’s social doctrine taken from the presentation page of the Church’s Compendium of Social Doctrine:

“To the people of our time, the Church offers her social doctrine. In fact, when the Church fulfills her mission of proclaiming the Gospel, she bears witness to man, in the name of Christ, to his dignity and his vocation to the communion of person. She teaches him the demands of justice and peace in conformity with divine wisdom.”

This prophetic mission of the Church has to be done in a more consistent way especially these when we are faced with all sorts of issues, controversies and challenges in the areas of business, politics, environment, culture, etc.

The disturbing impression is that in our temporal affairs, it seems the Church is silent or is mainly upstaged, sidelined and displaced by purely worldly ideologies and merely human reactions.

There seems a disconnect between the proclaimed Gospel and our concerns, both the small, daily and immediate kind as well as the big and long-running ones.

When Church leaders try to make some interventions, they are often seen as outsiders or clueless due to a host of factors like incompetence, lecturing style, etc.

Of course, it has to be understood that much of the Church’s continuing conversation with the world is done by the laity who have to be aware of their responsibility to the world and have to be properly trained and motivated for this mission.

Let’s not get used to sin!

2011-12-08T22:53:00.000+08:00

WITH the celebration of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary on December 8, we are given another reminder of a basic truth about ourselves that has been all but forgotten.

Our Lady, given to us by Christ himself to be our own Mother and our most powerful intercessor, reminds us of who we really are and how we are supposed to be. Like her, we are supposed to be sinless, though for us that can only happen when we finally arrive at our ultimate destination of heaven.

Just the same, we have to understand that at the beginning, we were supposed to be sinless. The same also at the end of time. Thus, in the Eucharistic preface of the feast’s Mass, we read the following about our Lady who is the perfect model for us:

“Full of grace, she was to be a worthy mother of your Son, your sign of favor to the Church at its beginning, and the promise of its perfection as the bride of Christ, radiant in beauty.

“Purest of virgins, she was to bring forth your Son, the innocent lamb who takes away our sins. You chose her from all women to be our advocate with you and our pattern of holiness.”

These beautiful words, so meaningful to us, should have no other effect than to make us develop a great love and devotion to our Lady, our Mother. They should strongly prompt us that she does nothing other than to give Jesus to us, Jesus who is everything to us.

They should also prod us to do everything to fight against sin. Nowadays, there are many pieces of evidence pointing to people getting used to sin, such that sin has become normal or that the sense of sin is waning.

Many people are falling into vices and other bad habits, worsened by the fact that these can now be easily hidden and rationalized. The tricky part is that many of these temptations and occasions of sin can also be moments of good possibilities. It now really depends on the integrity of the person to choose which path to take.

But what I see is that in many people there is practically no more fear of God nor of sin. They, even the young ones, seem to have become emptied of conscience. Their sense of right and wrong, good and evil, just follows any way the wind blows—it’s so arbitrary!

Many seem to be losing the sense of meaning and purpose in life. They swing from boredom to reckless adventures and idle gimmicks just to fill up their time.

The Internet is infested with porn. I just learned that many people carry with them downloaded porn in their cell phones. The new technologies have become the new scourge of our time, because many people are ill-prepared to use them. They are like little children playing with matches.

There is now an epidemic of self-abuse, substance abuse, all kinds of delinquency, negligences and irresponsibilities. The picture is really bad and rotten!

We should not allow this situation to go on without doing anything to correct it. I know it’s not going to be easy. But there’s always hope. St. Paul has reassured us that “where sin has abounded, the grace of God has abounded even more.”

We need to return to God through Mary. She is the one who will make things easy for us. She will put our mind and heart in their proper places, that is, focused on God and filled with love for him and for others.

She will help us with her example of humility, simplicity and obedience how to handle our weaknesses, how to fight in our ascetical struggles, how to be in God’s presence all the time, how to develop virtues.

She will teach us how to deal with temptations, how to be totally sincere as to acknowledge always our weakness and to never stay away from God. She will teach us how to deal with the wiles of the devil, the world and our own flesh and deceitful mind and heart.

This clear and strong relationship with God and with others, sustained by this Marian devotion, is basic and indispensable, because without it there’s no chance our spiritual and moral life can ever take wing. We would always be handicapped when that relation with God is weak.

We should never take for granted this crucial Marian dimension of our Christian life! Mary is the surest, safest, shortest path to Jesus.

Church perspectives

2011-12-06T22:52:00.001+08:00

IN the world of public opinion, there’s no doubt that a battle of perspectives is taking place. Each party has their own platforms or set of principles from which they see events and make their judgments, and many times they clash.

Just take a look at the newspapers, the hard copy or online, and the ever growing number of blogs in the digital continent, and you would have no doubt that indeed there’s some kind of war raging out there.

Social and political observers have attempted to classify them as conservatives or liberals, leftists or rightists, partisan or independent, secular or religious, etc. We can’t help but use these categories to more or less simplify our life, though we have to admit that these have their limits that we should always be aware of.

This is but normal, as long as we don’t forget that amid the flux of views and positions reflecting one’s attitudes and outlook in life, there is an unchanging core that should unite all of us together.

This is normal, because we always see things differently, even if we come from the same family, same school, same city and province, etc. Even in our own individual selves, if the different parts of the body could just speak, they too would have different takes on any concern.

Our human condition makes each one of an individual person, with a unique character and unrepeatable life and everything that goes with it. We should not be surprised that we have different backgrounds, experiences, attitudes, and therefore different views.

But we should never forget that no matter how different we and our views are, we are all human beings, persons, children of God, inhabiting the same earth, making use of the same resources.

Over and above these, we are one and united because we are supposed to love one another. Even our enemies deserve to be loved. We are urged to do so, because despite our differences we are all children of God.

We have to learn how to navigate within these terms. The problem arises when we get mixed up—when in failing to distinguish between what is absolute and relative, we absolutize what is relative, and relativize what is absolute.

The Church, the “expert in humanity,” offers a perspective that sets the line between what is absolute and relative. That´s because the Church assumes the perspective of God who through Christ in the Holy Spirit has endowed her with powers to do so. ¨Whatever you bind here on earth is bound in heaven...¨

We have to listen to what the Church says, but, of course, we also have to make sure that the Church says something about issues, questions, challenges, etc. She always has or should always have something to say, because whatever affects man, even in his temporal affairs, affects God and therefore the Church.

This is her prophetic mission which is carried out in different ways by the different elements that comprise her. The clergy, starting with the Pope, the bishops down to the priests, have an official or authoritative character when carrying out this function. Thus they have to be suitably competent for the office they occupy.

The lay faithful also have their prophetic mission as they try to infuse the Christian spirit in the earthly affairs they are involved in. This does not mean that the Church can dogmatize on matters of opinion, but she will always have something to say about how these matters ought to be handled.

First of all, we have to acknowledge that the Church is not just a human invention. She’s a divine, supernatural reality despite her human dimension. She’s a reality of faith, rather than just a reality of nature. We have to keep this very much in mind so that we don´t stray from how we ought to behave.

But because of her human dimension, she cannot but act also in a human way, that is, there is need for study, for consultation, for testing, for correcting, etc., especially when she has to comment on temporal and earthly issues like business, politics, culture, sports, entertainment, etc.

That´s why the social doctrine of the Church has been articulated so that there can be some ground rules to follow in pursuing our earthly business and politics. This is what the Church perspectives provide.

This is a crucial element in any given society, otherwise we will tend to chaos as differences and conflicts can lose their unitive basis and purpose, and their capacity to resolve themselves.

Local, global, metaphysical

2011-12-05T17:23:00.002+08:00

NOWADAYS, we cannot afford to remain local without going global. With the frenzied pace of world developments, it would be fatal if we ignore the widening scope of our concerns. We need to be ready for the delicate task of integrating the parochial to the universal, and even beyond.

We need to break loose from a provincial outlook to assume a more regional, national and even international perspective. This would require adjustments in our attitudes and ways of thinking and judging, based on a healthy balance among the different cultures, ethos, mentalities we will be dealing with.

We need to widen, and also deepen, our knowledge of things. We just have to realize more keenly that we have to develop an interdisciplinary approach. While we may be comfortable and competent with a particular viewpoint—economic, social, political, etc.—we need to connect with the other angles from which things are also considered.

In this regard, we should not disregard the spiritual and moral aspects of the issues and other developments. These, in fact, are a constant that should never be waived. They are the final guiding light in assessing things.

Truth is we need to connect all our temporal affairs in their varying manifestations, levels and aspects, to God, to his plan for us, and to the requirements of truth, justice and charity.

While enjoying a certain autonomy, our worldly businesses just cannot be absolutely detached from our duty towards God and others. They need to be inspired and oriented towards God and by our love and concern for the others. Sad to say, the relevant attitude and ability to do this are largely absent in most people yet.

For this, we have to develop the skill to go metaphysical, that is, to think beyond the physical and the material dimensions of our life. This would enable us to go to the essential without getting lost in the incidentals and accidentals. This would enable us to uphold and defend the absolute truths while being tolerant with matters of opinion.

Thinking metaphysical allows us to enter the spiritual and supernatural realities of our faith, hope and charity, the ultimate considerations we have to make when doing our temporal affairs.

We should never remain in the purely human, natural, social and material dimensions of our life. God has to come in. He’s actually already there. We just have to acknowledge him and include him in our thoughts, words and deeds.

This, of course, is not going to be easy. Just imagine the vast mass of the population that need to be educated and given proper and continuing formation! Even among the so-called educated class, how many can really distinguish and handle the intricacies of such big realities as culture, faith, charity, common good, justice, etc.?

And yet I’ve also been meeting a growing number of young people who are conversant with both local and international issues. They’re, of course, techies who with today’s powerful gadgets can link up with people from distant places and with ideas from all over the place.

I envy them, in a way, because when I was at their age, I did not have that kind of grasp of world events. We contented ourselves with what we can get from the radio and newspapers, and later the TV.

With the new technologies, all of us should feel the need, as far as we are able, to be technologically abreast, so we can navigate today’s complex world more easily. We have to help another here.

But the young techies today need to be closely guided. The great advantages they enjoy now can also turn to be proximate occasions of sins and temptations. Let’s always be wary of the duty to correctly use these powerful gadgets, otherwise they can do us great harm.

Ethics and morals are never useless items in this regards. In fact, they hold pride of place in our considerations of things. They have the first and the last word.

What is crucial is that all of us be properly grounded in our relationship with God and with others. With that in order, we can manage to have a good sense of value and priority to lead us. We would have the suitable criteria to enlighten us in our thinking and assessments.

This would also guide us in sorting out the practical aspects of today’s intricate challenges, like how much time to spend in the Internet, how much money to allocate to different needs, how to be immersed in the things of the world without getting lost in it.

Addiction and the spiritual life

2011-12-04T15:16:00.001+08:00

FRANKLY, I was surprised when I was invited recently to give a talk in a rehab center about addiction from the spiritual point of view. As far I know, I have not made any serious paper on the topic, and my knowledge about it, I confess, is at best sophomoric.

Just the same, I accepted the request simply because I found it hard to say no to the one who invited me. Besides, the spiritual angle of the issue made me think it could and should be a concern of mine too. Anyway, whether I made a right or wrong decision, I just said yes to a friend.

I tried to make a little excursion into the materials I thought were relevant, and finding little, I just proceeded to the date begging the Holy Spirit for light. I went to the Internet and, yes, while there were some materials, I found them a bit inadequate, if not biased toward certain cultic practices. So I just followed my common sense.

Everyone is, of course, familiar with addiction. It’s a repetitive act, a kind of obsessive act that one finds hard to break even if wants to. It seems to be beyond the control of the party involved. He needs outside help.

The distinguishing mark of addiction is that it’s a vice, not a virtue, since the uncontrollable repeated acts are harmful to the person concerned. He may or may not know it, or he may deny it, but the fact remains that addiction is a vice, not a virtue. It is harmful, not helpful, even if the party says otherwise.

Sad to say, addiction is a plague we are facing in an increasingly menacing way today. Offhand, I suspect that our new “freedoms” generated by the advancement of technology, the greater availability of resources at least to some people, etc., somehow create a certain environment that may be good to some but are highly toxic to others.

Those who are more vulnerable to this affliction are those who enjoy a certain amount of advantages in life—intelligence, talents, power, wealth, fame—but who unfortunately have not been able to put them on the right foundation, order and purpose.

When the things that we have are not referred to God and to others, they easily become an instrument for our own selfish purposes. We then become weak to the seductions, allurements and concerns of this world.

That’s when we can develop addicting attitudes and practices that are objectively harmful to us. They are meant as some kind of defense mechanism, a way to escape certain realities or to find relief and rationalization over some developments.

It involves a certain kind of deceit which, when not corrected early enough, can grow so strong as to be invincible by the person himself. When he refuses to acknowledge his predicament and seek help, then the problem becomes worse.

I believe that while there may be certain organic and environmental factors that predispose one to fall into addiction, the main and ultimate factor would be how one thinks, judges and reasons about this situation.

We need to be most careful about how we exercise these spiritual operations and functions of ours that show that there is something spiritual in us, and that therefore, we should take care of our spiritual life.

Sad to say, many people are not aware of the existence, the nature and the responsibilities we owe to our spiritual life. They may have heard about the spiritual life, but they cannot relate themselves to it, not knowing exactly it is.

When I ask people randomly how would we know there is something spiritual in us, 99% would give me a blank stare. They don’t realize that the act of thinking, judging, reasoning, loving, etc., are spiritual operations that indicate we have something spiritual in us.

Much less would they know that these spiritual operations with their respective faculties (the intelligence and the will) need to be rightly engaged to their proper foundation and end, just like our bodily organism needs to be related to food and other healthy practices.

They cannot figure out why it is necessary for us to take care of our relationship with God, since he is the origin and the purpose, the life and the power of our spiritual faculties.

When one does not pray nor make any effort to deal with God, but instead enjoys just pursuing his own ideas and interests, he is actually harming himself. He is prone to fall to addiction.

Experience God

2011-12-02T17:19:00.000+08:00

IS it possible to experience God, to feel his presence, to know his will and to participate in his own life? To all these questions, the answer is a loud yes.

Not only is it possible, but also, first of all, it is God’s will. Besides, he has endowed us with the power that would enable us to achieve these feats.

God as our Creator and Father always intervenes in our life. He is never away from us even if we fall into the state of sin. We only lose him in hell. But in our whole earthly sojourn, he is in us, right deep in the core of our existence.

That’s because he is the giver and maintainer of our existence. For as long as we exist, God is in us. Our existence does not depend on our biological constitution alone, nor on food and air and health only. Even before these things become indispensable to us, it is God who gives and keeps our existence.

And since we have been made in his image and likeness, he links with us through our intelligence and will, through our thinking and loving, and thus he comes to us as objects of our innate desire for truth, goodness and beauty.

That’s why we have to be most careful in the exercise of our spiritual faculties—how we are thinking, judging, reasoning, loving, etc. These human operations have to be firmly grounded on God, and not just made to be mainly dominated by the twists and turns of our bodily and natural conditions.

Our thinking and willing, our knowing and loving should be properly engaged and not allowed to just drift anywhere, and especially when they are given only to the instance of our instincts, emotions and passions. They have to be properly inspired and directed.

The need to experience God has become an urgent necessity these days because the spiritual and moral health of our life, taken individually and collectively, depends on this fact and on no other.

Pope Benedict emphasized this point recently. In an address to some lay faithful, he said the following:

“How do we reawaken the question of God so that it becomes the fundamental question?...The question of God is reawakened in meeting those who have a living relationship with the Lord. God is known through men and women who know him. The way to him passes, in a concrete way, through those who have met him.”

This is just but natural. God is not just an idea, a theory, a philosophical or theological term. Christ is not just a historical figure nor an object of curiosity. God is alive. In fact, he is the very foundation of reality and of life itself. It’s not in his character to stay away from us or to hide from us or to play hard to get.

Thus, the Pope said that God should be the central point of reference in our thinking and acting. He warned that ignoring God will harm our humanity. “A mentality that rejects every reference to the transcendent has shown itself to be incapable of preserving the human,” he said.

“The spread of this mentality has generated the crisis that we are experiencing today, which is a crisis of meaning and of values before it is an economic and social crisis,” he added. How true!

God actually engages us every moment of our life. This is what providence is all about. We have to learn how to correspond to that continual divine governance, by learning how to pray, how to know and follow his will, how to offer whatever we are doing to him, how to live in his presence all the time, how what we are doing at the moment fits in his plan, etc.

For this we need to study well the doctrine of our faith, to have recourse to the sacraments, to develop the virtues, and to commit ourselves to a certain plan of continuing piety so that whatever may be the circumstances of our life, we can manage to be with him always.

To experience God is not an impossibility. Nor is it meant only to some gifted if not strange people. It is for all, though we need to help another, since to achieve that condition involves a lifelong process with endless stages, aspects and possibilities.

To experience God should be second nature to us. With the proper attitude and skills, with the relevant plans and virtues, this is always possible. Nowadays, the world needs people who have direct experience of God!

Spirit of Advent

2011-11-30T22:48:00.000+08:00

THE season of Advent is once again with us. The preparation for Christmas is now entering its final stretch. But Advent means much more than just decorating our houses and offices with the frills of December.

Advent, more than anything else, is a reminder for us all that we need to prepare for the second and final coming of Christ. It reminds us that we have to look forward to that coming, with efforts to make Christ “all in all” in us, or “everything to everyone.”

This is the more important meaning of Advent. We have to rescue this liturgical season from the dustbin of obscurity and oblivion into which many of us have thrown it. We need to remember that our life here on earth is a pilgrimage, a work in progress, whose destination and completion is Christ, the Alpha and Omega.

We have been created in his image and likeness, and with his grace made children of his, meant to participate in God’s very own life. While God created us without us—to paraphrase St. Augustine—he cannot complete that creation without us. God does not impose his love and goodness on us. We need to correspond to it too.

This religious dimension and purpose of our life needs to be re-emphasized again and again, since we tend to forget it or take it for granted. As a result, many have already developed an anti-God or anti-religion mentality, perhaps not so much out of malice as of ignorance, confusion and error.

Let’s hope the media can help in this effort to remind and clarify things in this regard. It’s understandable that they go full blast into mundane issues like politics, business, culture, etc., but they should not leave religion and faith behind.

Ignoring faith and religion invariably leads us to paths of trouble, conflicts, misunderstanding and hatred, and all forms of abuses of our freedom and rights. That’s simply because ignoring faith and religion in our earthly affairs takes away the source and purpose of freedom.

Let’s remember that freedom comes from God. We did not generate it on our own. It’s a gift, the highest gift God gives us, since it is what resembles us with him, and enables us to love and be responsible for all our actions and, in fact, for our whole life.

This freedom is shown in its best form in the life of Christ who did nothing other than to do the will of his Father, no matter what the cost. Let’s hope that this truth of our faith gets a fair hearing in us individually and collectively, especially in the media, since they are a powerful force of influence in society.

Let’s bring this truth of faith about our freedom to its practical manifestations, freeing it from a mainly theoretical understanding. In our daily concerns as well as in the big political and socio-economic issues that confront us, we need to highlight how we ought to live our freedom well, always referring it to God.

At the moment, we find ourselves in such confusion that many of us don’t know anymore where to go. The local political squabbles, the world economic crisis, the social unrest in many parts of the world just don’t have purely political or socio-economic causes.

These causes would not be radical enough if they are not referred to how they violate the use of our freedom as given to us by God. The real germ of the problem would elude detection when the spiritual and moral roots of these causes are ignored.

The real culprit is when we misuse or abuse our freedom to do not God’s will but simply ours, in whatever level or way that will of ours can manifest itself. The real culprit is when we do our own will in opposition to God’s, cleverly using our talents, resources, and the imperfections of our political and legal systems.

In the media right now, for example, there is so much expression of nothing short than the sheer law of Talion, the eye-for-an eye type of justice, a primitive kind long considered to be inhuman. It’s amazing that this kind of mentality still prevails.

There’s quickness to get angry, to get even, to gloat at one’s misfortunes, to judge and condemn. Criminals are not anymore considered human and are therefore placed in a kind of hell here on earth.

This was never the example of Christ. He was quick to forgive and to understand. He was quick to heal. Let’s hope we truly understand the spirit of Advent!

Running amok

2011-11-27T00:36:00.001+08:00

WHEN things are not inspired by charity, when we fail to keep a supernatural outlook in life, when we just depend on our reasoning and feelings, then most likely we end up running amok, killing everyone we meet.

This cruelty can easily be seen when political issues and controversies erupt. They erupt in the first place because many people think politics is outside the domain of charity, faith and religion.

The underlying mentality is that prayer and sacrifice have nothing to do with politics. One would be accused of living in a different planet if they behave along lines of charity and religion. He would not be “getting real.”

This attitude has been demonizing us for quite some time now that I’m afraid it has become part of our culture. Proof to that is the openness with which this inhumanity is expressed in public, and hardly anyone complains. On the contrary, a great majority applauds it.

I thought, for example, that gossiping and backbiting are done in whispers, quite hidden in some corner and in small groups. No, it’s not like that anymore. Gossips, backbiting, all sorts of impertinent ad hominems can now be broadcast on radio, TV and the Internet, with many people stoking them to their maximum viciousness.

What is worse—and I hope I’m wrong—is that they think they are doing the right thing, that their reaction is what is just and fair. They have lost the sense of balance, and charity is, of course, regarded as an outcast in the discussion.

In this kind of discussion, the targets are painted all in black. They do not seem to have any saving grace. They seem to be beyond redemption.

This does not bode well of us as a people. We will be hooked to divisiveness and to a spiral of vindictiveness if we exclude charity and the finer requirements of religion in our political discussions.

Let’s remember that our Lord himself told us to love even our enemies. He himself forgave those who crucified him. To the repentant thief, he also promised the Paradise. He told us to forgive not only seven times, but seventy times seven. He asked us to be merciful, because our heavenly Father is merciful.

We need to consider these words as the perfection of our humanity, a way to purify and heal us of our spiritual and moral wounds. They serve none other than to reconcile us with God and with one another. These commands and counsels are not optional. They are necessary.

The truth is that we are all sinners. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 Jn 1,8) We need to understand each other, and forgive each other. No use getting entangled with our sins, mistakes and failures. We just have to move on, doing all to make that possible as soon as we can.

I was both amused and bothered when I heard a radio commentator say that since justice is supposed to be equal, then everyone has to be treated in the same way whether the one involved is a high official or just an ordinary Juan.

In the first place, equality in justice is never to be interpreted as uniformity in treatment. This is commonsensical. Even in our family life, parents love their children equally but treat them differently, simply because the children are different from one another.

Wherever we go we try to be fair with everyone, but we always treat everyone differently, because people are just different. We don’t make a big fuss about this, unless there is clear injustice.

I froze in disbelief when the commentator said that if a public official who happens to be sick already has been arrested, he should go to prison with all the other criminals who had to bear with all the inconveniences of prison life, like hard labor and exposure to sickness because that is simply a prisoner’s plight.

That, he said, is equal justice. There should be no privileges like a hospital arrest. Then he launched into personal attacks on the public official involved, taking jibes at the physical defects of the person. All this at prime time and in a major media outfit. Unbelievable!

He forgot that everyone has a right to protect oneself, his name, his dignity. If many prisoners are treated inhumanly, it’s not because of some discrimination. It’s because of the imperfections of our human justice and legal system.

Again, if there is no charity, our justice can run amok.

Youth and social change

2011-11-26T20:51:00.000+08:00

O, YOUTH! The dawning of the future, the shaper of tomorrow! If the child is the father of the man, then youth must be that crucial stage in-between that would determine whether the child is going to be a good father or a bad father of the man. Youth is the junction where one takes a life-defining choice. It is that transitory part of life that is still seeking stability and maturity.

That’s reason enough to put utmost attention and care on them. All sectors—Church, schools, civil society, government, media, etc.—ought to have a permanent concern for their well-being not only in the physical sense, but more so in the spiritual and moral sense.

By sheer number alone, barring the so-called demographic winter some countries are now suffering, the youth make for a tremendous force in the Church and in the world. They simply need to be well formed so that they too, can help in shaping the kind of world and future they want and ought to live, the world God wants for us.

They have to be gradually drawn to assume increasing responsibilities, instead of leaving them to fall into self-absorption and isolationism that are always a danger.

That’s because in spite of the new technologies that in theory should promote sociability, with the wrong attitudes and habits, the youth can instead harden in their egotism, vanity and individualism. Instead of getting more deeply in touch with reality, they can get lost in a world of virtuality, creating a bubble for themselves.

Toward this end, the youth need to be given clear doctrine and criteria, based on our natural law and our Christian faith, so that their innate dynamism would be well-guided and oriented.

With these, they can avoid the pitfalls of exaggerated idealism and activism, to mention a few of the anomalies that usually threaten them. Some other menaces can be extreme, radical independence on the one hand, and the tendency to fall into a herd mentality, on the other, which show a certain degree of instability in their condition.

Times are now complicated and confusing. The youth today are exposed to more things, both good and bad, constructive and destructive, than their counterpart of yesterday. They can flip quickly from local issues to the global ones, thanks to our new technologies. They now have in their hands powerful tools and instruments that can be used either for good or for evil.

Besides, the world environment has changed tremendously in so short a time. Materialism and commercialism are far fiercer in the present than in the past. And we are actually wallowing in a cesspool of secularism and relativism, made worse by the fact that these anomalies can now be better disguised and rationalized.

More than just being given doctrine and criteria, the youth must make these doctrine and criteria their own, to the point that these become their convictions, enabling them to think, judge, speak and act properly, and later to love and enter into a life of commitment. They have to go beyond the stage of theories, clichés and slogans.

This is the ideal situation. We need youth who are active agents of change for the better in society. But how can this happen?

I imagine that first of all, we have to take care of each one of them. Before they are treated as a group, a class or sector, they have to be considered individually and personally. Each one has to be known as he really is—his character and temperament, his strengths and weaknesses, his likes and dislikes, his dreams and fears, etc.

It’s important that each of them is able to share his thoughts and desires with someone he can trust completely. What is important is that each one feels loved and cared for so he too can learn to love and care for the others.

The earlier one realizes deeply that life is relational that involves not only physical and material things, but also and especially spiritual and moral things, the better for him and for everyone else.

Everyone has to learn how to love properly, based on the love of God and not just any form of human attraction. This is more properly known as communion. This realization will serve as the seed for the youth to become active agents in social change.

Social action should always be a function of charity, truth and justice, and should foster communion. While it involves issues, it should not just stop there, but rather proceed to build up communion.

Call for sobriety and magnanimity

2011-11-21T23:03:00.000+08:00

I WAS just amused to notice certain differences in the behavior of our leaders and public officials when faced with issues and charges.

I remember that when a few months ago some bishops were falsely accused of misusing government money to buy Pajeros, the bishops immediately came forward to both apologize, which was not necessary, and explain the matter to the public.

They even went to the extent of returning the so-called Pajeros that turned out to be simple vans used for charity—again something that was not necessary. In fact, the embarrassed investigators asked them to keep the vehicles, but the bishops would not.

They were willing to face the taunters and the senators and earnestly showed the real score of the issue. The public were mainly supportive of the bishops, though there of course were some people who “spat and buffeted” them.

But when politicians are concerned, the reaction of everyone, both those involved and the public in general, takes a different, very ugly turn. It would seem that in this field, everyone has the right to do anything, including the unethical and the immoral, to save one’s face or to show one’s outrage.

There’s an open season for venting one’s anger, hatred, deceit, revenge, envy, and many other forms of vile, venom and malice. Restraint and moderation are discarded as passions and emotions are given free rein.

Gloating over one’s misfortunes, otherwise a taboo during normal times, becomes a standard practice in times of tension and crisis, and this can be done not only by ordinary people, but also by politicians with high and very honorable positions and substantial credentials.

This is really a shame on all of us. Are we still human? Are we still Christian? Does a mistake one can commit—no matter how serious and many times still to be investigated—warrant public lynching in the media and elsewhere? Does it authorize us to let go of our rule of law, no matter how imperfect it is?

I was reading the opinions of many people in the social networks, and though there were many valid points raised, it could not be denied that there was a prevalence of poor thinking and reasoning, rash judgments and knee-jerk reactions, poisoned partisan views that have already abandoned objectivity and fairness, pure bashings.

We all need to discipline ourselves when we are faced with exciting issues. We have to make sure that we have good control of our agitated feelings and emotions, and not only should we try to think rationally, but also to see to it that our thoughts and feelings are infused with charity.

Yes, charity should never be cast aside even as we try to pass through the trickiest stage of exacting justice on some persons. Charity is not an optional item. It is a basic, indispensable requirement in our human and Christian behavior.

We cannot say that just because we are dealing with politics, or we are dealing with a crook, etc., that we can be excused from charity, or that we can feel free to tear that person’s name if the not person himself to shreds.

Sad to say, this seems to be the prevalent mindset of many people. We really need to dismantle this mentality, because it is not human, much less Christian. It makes us insensitive to the real essence of righteousness and plunges us to a blinding self-righteousness.

We have to learn to be sober, allowing our thinking to be inspired by true love and compassion even as we also have to uphold justice. We need to broaden our perspectives so we can consider many other factors, taking us away from our biases and prejudices, and giving us a fuller picture of the situation.

We should feel uncomfortable when we find ourselves in some rage, and should do all to get out of that state as soon as we can. Our problem is sometimes we like to prolong that mood for as long as we can.

We have to be magnanimous, quick to forgive and to ask for forgiveness, focused more on what is constructive rather than dwelling on the distracting and destructive.

We should instead look for ways on how to heal wounds, to bring back those who strayed, to look for the lost, to strengthen the weak, to remedy what is defective in our systems. We have to look forward more than backward, the future more than the past.

Sobriety and magnanimity should not just be nice words. They have to be lived.

Sustaining our conversation with God

2011-11-19T12:47:00.001+08:00

WE have to learn to converse with our Lord all the time. Let’s try to avoid any gap in this lifelong conversation with our Lord. This is the ideal thing we can and ought to do, primarily because our life is not simply our own. Our life is always a life with God. That’s how we are created and designed.

It’s a shared life, and the least thing we can do to maintain that sharing is to keep a conversation with him. To paraphrase a romantic song, we should keep our music with God playing, finding new things always to say to him, and certainly we can never run out of things to tell or ask him. With all the challenges, problems and pressures we have today, we will always have something to say.

Obviously we have to overcome certain biases and the natural awkwardness that come with this necessity. We can compare this situation of unease to a child who has to learn to speak, walk, write, eat and behave properly, etc.

In the beginning, like the child we have to pass through some clumsy drills of the learning process. We need to develop a sense of focus and substance in our conversation with God. But if we just persist and persevere, we can hack it sooner or later.

The first thing that we have to be clear about is that we actually need to talk with God. We should dump the common idea that talking with God is nonsense. This is actually a groundless myth.

We need to talk to him because as our Creator and Father who loves us all the way, he is everything to us—the source of truth, goodness, wisdom, power, etc. Even if we cannot penetrate the mystery that shrouds him, talking to him provides us with the best and ultimate perspective we can have in understanding reality.

He is the one that gives meaning to all the events in our life. He gives us the proper direction. In fact, Christ described himself as “the way, the truth and the life” for us. “No one goes to the Father except through him.”

We should not just talk with ourselves, nor just with the others. Our consciousness, which is a result of some conversation, should not just be limited to our own thoughts and feelings. God has to enter into it.

Our sense of consciousness would be gravely handicapped if we just use our common sense, or our own estimations of things. We even should not just rely on our arts and sciences nor our increasingly sophisticated technologies to cope with all the demands of life. We need God always. He is the light and the strength we need.

God is the foundation of reality. What is true, good and beautiful can only come and end with him. Outside of him, we will only get at virtuality, not at reality. A basic attitude to develop therefore is to actively look for Christ in the things that we are handling or doing.

We should not be passive and wait for some kind of inspiration before we start talking with God. We ought to have a pro-active approach. We need to look for him, and engage him in a conversation.

With God’s grace, which is never lacking, and with our proper dispositions, and some skills and habits that we need to develop, we can always enter into some dialogue with God. We can always refer things to him.

That’s why St. Paul tells us that “whether you eat or drink, or whatever else you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor 10,31) And again, St. Paul encourages us to work such that “God may be all in all.” (1 Cor 15,28) This is the goal we have to aim at.

When we are in the dark, we need to talk with God. When we are tempted or experiencing the sting of our weakness, then talking to God becomes urgent. Remember St. Paul’s “it’s when I’m weak that I’m strong,” that shows us that we can use our weakness to occasion our getting close to God, our source of strength.

When we are baffled by the twists and turns of things inside us and outside us, our Lord for sure will be there to give us a sense of direction and confidence. When we are tired, harassed, bored, whatever, he gives us rest, peace and joy.

We need to sharpen our skills to sustain our conversation with God always!

Life of fascination

2011-11-15T02:17:00.000+08:00

A CERTAIN sense of fascination should characterize our life. As a jazzy song would put it, fascination should take control. Let’s hope that as another old song would put it, fascination turns to love, just as love often relishes in fascination.

Saints are invariably known for their life of fascination in spite of the trials, difficulties and even martyrdom that they had to suffer. Some of them have reached the level of mysticism and ecstasy, which we can consider as the extraordinary forms of fascination.

All this is understandable, since as humans with body and not only with a soul, an ideal situation for us would be to be awe-struck or be excited even in the humdrum of our daily routine. Ideally, the body should share in the true delights of the soul.

We just have to make sure then that our sense of fascination is not exclusively developed and lived in the realm of the flesh, of the material, and of the earthly and temporal. That would detach the body from our soul, our material condition from our spiritual character and supernatural goal.

We have to make sure that our fascination is inspired by faith and sparked to action by our will. We can describe it as a theological fascination that has to be deliberately developed.

It should not just be a spontaneous movement of the flesh, stuck at the level of spur-of-the-moment reactions entirely dependent on feelings and ruled by an obsession for novelties and curiosities. That would make fascination less human.

To be sure, fascination is not just a physical act. It is a human act that should correspond to all the requirements of our human nature and condition.

Our fascination should not just delight the flesh. It should delight us in our totality as a human person and as a child of God. In short, it should delight our mind and will properly, stimulating them properly to get interested in their proper objects.

And these objects could only be love for God and others. Short of these, our fascination would be incomplete and imperfect. It certainly would be vulnerable to abuses and excesses.

Thus, we see many people getting addicted to sex, drugs, gambling, worldly power, etc., since their sense of fascination has not entered the realm of the spiritual and the supernatural.

This is a challenge we should acknowledge and face. We have to save our sense of fascination from the grip of the material and emotional to make it spiritual and theological.

Obviously, in developing this sense of fascination, we need to go through stages. While the initial stage is understandably the physical and emotional, we have to understand that it should go all the way to the spiritual. For this, a certain training is required. The proper understanding, attitudes and habits have to be developed.

In this regard, it might be interesting to pay attention to a passage in the gospel which can refer to this need of ours to develop a life of fascination. It’s in the gospel of St. John where we hear our Lord say: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw al things to myself.” (12,32)

The passage that follows it immediately gives a parenthetical explanation of these words. “Now this he said, signifying what death he should die.”

I think that in these passages we are made to know how our Lord attracts us to himself and therefore what should fascinate us. It’s when our Lord is lifted on the cross that we would be drawn to him. It’s when we train our attention to Christ on the cross that we would be fascinated by him.

And that is because it is on the cross that our Lord shows the supreme and most pure love that can ever be shown to us, and that therefore should attract us. Our problem is that we tend to confine love to what is physically and sensibly pleasant only, to what makes us feel good.

It is a shallow kind of love that cannot understand the value of suffering in this life, the cross, as a necessary ingredient in our human condition that is now marked by sin and all sorts of weakness.

We need to train ourselves to focus and meditate on the passion and death of Christ and to develop this theological fascination of the crucified Christ. Only then can we perfect our sense of fascination that should mark our life here on earth. Only then can we protect ourselves from unwanted, immoral fascinations.

Transmitting faith

2011-11-11T21:41:00.000+08:00

FAITH is, of course, a supernatural gift to us, given by God in ways that defy understanding. But since it concerns us, we have to realize there are things we need to do to make that faith take root in our lives, grow to maturity, and spread out to other people.

We have to realize then that we have a duty to transmit faith to the others, and to help them keep that faith vibrant and fruitful. Faith can never just be an individual, isolated affair. It too has a social aspect. In fact, it needs to be shared and to animate our culture, since it is supposed to cover all aspects of our life.

Obviously, to be effective in this business, we should not only talk about faith. We have to walk the talk. We really have to live it and incarnate it consistently. One way or another, it has to show externally, and the others should be able to see it, and admire and love it eventually, making it their own as well.

Only then can faith be understood, loved and lived by the others. Faith is not just a collection of doctrine nor a smart intellectual exercise. Much less is it only about classes, lectures and modules. It’s about life of love with God and with everybody else.

For this to happen, we can cite at least three things that are needed. One is to develop a true life of piety. Faith cannot prosper unless its seed falls on the fertile ground of piety.

Piety is the attitude that corresponds to the deepest longing we have in our heart. We realize that we need to be attached to someone higher than us. Thus, we can have first of all a filial piety toward our parents, then to other people whom we truly love. Ultimately, we should realize we need to have a piety toward God.

This piety is expressed in deeds—praying, doing acts of worship, and other related acts or gestures like making sacrifices, pilgrimages, fasting and abstinence, going to the sacraments—all of which happening in the heart and tilting us toward God. These should be like our breathing, or the beating of the heart, a second nature to us.

A second point would be the need for doctrine. Piety without doctrine is a dangerous situation, prone to superstitions and other abuses. We have to understand that doctrine is for us the path to know and love God more and more.

Doctrine is not just a body of ideas and theories. The doctrine of our faith is life itself in the context of love. It is God himself, who is at once the source, the substance and standard of life and love. We should never reduce doctrine to mere ideas, words and theories.

We should spread this doctrine as widely as possible, seeing to it that the study of doctrine should be within the context of love of God and others. It should never be converted into a mere intellectual affair that would surely empty it of its living substance, leaving only a shell.

We need to be active in studying and teaching catechism, and in following closely the Church magisterium as expressed in the words of the Holy Father and the bishops in union with the Pope. When we study doctrine, we should get to know Christ better. When we teach or preach it, we should be able to show Christ to others.

A third point would be the lifelong development of virtues. When piety and doctrine do not produce virtues, there would be something terribly wrong in our understanding and life of faith.

Faith by definition is always transformative. It will always have an effect in a manner much more effective than what a most potent medicine can do to heal us of a certain sickness.

So, a man of faith will always be a man of virtues, especially charity that includes everything else that is good and perfecting in us. Faith can be shown when we have patience, temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, humility, etc.

In the work of apostolate and evangelization that we should be doing and where faith is transmitted, it’s important that we manage to really befriend everyone, listening to them, adapting ourselves to them, and gently leading them with gift of tongues to Christ.

We have to remember that this business of transmitting faith is a most intimate affair, where freedom has to be respected all the time, and a lot of patience and sacrifice are required.

Dignity of labor

2011-11-10T22:19:00.001+08:00

I FEEL that we have to resurrect from the grave the dignity of labor. For long, it has fallen into such disrepute that our young generation today often thinks of it as a curse, a compulsory evil, or a plague to be avoided at all costs.

Even those who may be considered as intelligent and well-motivated, going to schools, training programs and all that, often succumb to the wrong notion that their high education can take them away from some work they consider lowly.

That is not just right. Work and labor, whether manual or intellectual, in the fields and farms or in offices, is always part of our human nature, part of God’s design for us to make us image and likeness of his, and even children of his.

Any kind of work, as long as it is honest work, affirms our humanity. It actualizes whatever potentials we have. It is the way we contribute to the common good, the main means to earn our living. Work and labor just make us legitimately proud and happy.

More than these, it enables us to share in God’s providence over us, a way to reach our spiritual and supernatural goal. We need to highlight this truth, because the prevalent understanding of work detaches it from its objective divine context. Indeed, it can be our path to be with God right in the middle of the world.

While it’s true that we can have different aptitudes toward different kinds of work—some are meant more for white-collar jobs than the blue ones, others better as managers than clerks, some prefer to till the land than handle computers, etc.—truth is all of us need to work, and any kind of work would just be fine.

I would even venture to say that he who discriminates against the simple, ordinary work like the household chores would already be handicapped to tackle the bigger, extraordinary tasks we can encounter in life.

Remember our Lord saying: “He who is faithful in little is also faithful in much.” We need to digest the wisdom of these words well.

I think this point is crucial especially these days when we are experiencing rapid developments that often cause changes and disruptions. We have to learn to be flexible—to retrain ourselves when it is requisite given a situation, and to be ready to take on whatever job is necessary or convenient at the moment.

We need to be upbeat about these challenges, and avoid falling into passivity, waiting for the so-called ‘right job’ to come to us. The ideal attitude should enable us to be a CEO of a conglomerate one day, and a gardener the next day without suffering any crisis.

We have to reinforce the attitude that was expressed one time by our Lord when he said: “I came to serve and not to be served.” At another instance, he recommended that we should always remind ourselves that we are simply “unprofitable servants,” doing only what we are supposed to do.

We should not mind whether, in our unavoidable human rankings, we are on top or at the bottom, in front or at the back, the main actor or just an extra. We should be happy where we are placed at the moment, as long as we are working.

We have to avoid a culture of privileges and entitlements, though some fair remuneration for our work is always necessary. But we need to take extra care to avoid taking our work out of its primordial nature and reason.

Our problem is that we tend to take our duty to work out of its original context in the plan of God, and spin a merely human culture around it that distorts its nature, character and purpose.

And so our labor easily becomes an instrument of pride, vanity, greed, deceit, envy, hatred, etc. And from these, what can we expect but injustice and inequality in society, and later on, spreading social disturbances until things reach a flashpoint for collapse?

Early on in life, when people are still children in their respective homes, we should be taught clearly about this objective dignity of work and labor. Everyone needs to be shown how to love work, acquire the proper attitudes and habits.

I once met a young man who was a successful yuppie with a top position in the corporate world, but who remained simple and humble, willing and eager to do household chores like cooking and washing dishes. I pray there be more of him.

Concatenation

2011-11-10T22:16:00.001+08:00

THE word comes from “catena,” Latin for chain, a string of links, usually metallic, which with the prefix “con-” (or “cum” in Latin), meaning “with,” and the suffix, “-ation,” means the act or the state of being bound or connected.

The word is usually made to refer to the material item of a chain. Otherwise it is often used in a literary sense, as in a metaphor or a simile. But hardly is it used in the spiritual and moral sense, as in our duty to build up linkages among ourselves.

This is unfortunate, since our human dignity and our vocation urge us precisely to construct and strengthen in a constant and increasing way our interrelationships. We are meant to be connected with the others. No one lives alone.

This can be gleaned from our Christian faith when our Lord himself commanded us, first, to love our neighbor as ourselves, then later on in a more perfect way, to love one another as he loves us.

In fact, the Compendium of the Catechism of the Church teaches us that “the human person has a communal dimension as an essential component of his nature and vocation.” (401)

But even in our natural self, without considering the inputs of our faith yet, we can already discern a strong tendency to be with others, though this predisposition can easily be thwarted for a number of reasons.

Thus, we are born into a family, and we need our parents and siblings, and later on our friends, classmates, colleagues, etc., for us to grow, develop and find happiness here on earth.

We neither can avoid organizing ourselves into ascending levels of society—from family to local, national and international communities—simply because we need them. Problems we encounter along the way cannot stop this trend.

We have to be more aware that this human process just cannot be inspired by our natural needs alone nor ruled merely by the natural laws of economics, sociology, politics, and much less by the advantages of popularity and practicality.

We have to understand that our need and the corresponding duty to “concatenate” among ourselves go beyond these natural and temporal reasons. That need and duty arise from the spiritual character of our nature and the supernatural goal to which it is called.

Yes, to put it bluntly, the spirituality of our nature, expressed in our capacity to think, know, judge, reason, choose, love, etc., would not be complete unless it is poised if not engaged with the supernatural reality of a Supreme Being, who is God, our Creator and everything, eternal, omnipotent, provident, etc.

St. Augustine vividly gave an expression of this condition of ours when he said: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” It is inherent in us to be connected with God, the ultimate Other, and with and through him, with all the others.

Thus, we are told that love for God is always inseparable from love for the others. We are “designed” to enter into communion, which is not mere physical union, but a union of life and love, with God and others.

In others words, we have to understand that we are meant to be responsible for one another. We cannot say, “That’s his problem, that’s his own affair.” While it’s true that we enjoy a right to privacy and that we also have the social principle of subsidiarity, all these do not mean we can ever be indifferent to the others.

Their concerns and affairs are somehow ours too. The faster we get convinced of this truth, the more quickly we understand it and prepare ourselves adequately to meet its practical consequences, readying ourselves to help others in the worst scenarios, the better for us.

Our Lord did this not only by becoming man, but also by assuming all the sinfulness of men. This he did by embracing the cross and freely allowing himself to die on it, in spite of his obvious sinlessness.

It’s a great lesson for us to learn. We will fail to establish and reinforce our true unity in its different levels and aspects—personal, social, cultural, etc.—if we refuse to follow the example of Christ, who is “the life, the truth and the way” for us.

We have to heed St. Paul’s advice that’s clearly inspired by Christ’s example: “Bear each other’s burden, and you shall fulfill the law of Christ.” (Gal 6,2) We have to start training ourselves to acquire this attitude and lifestyle.

This is the way to fulfill the duty of concatenation.

Charity amid differences and conflicts

2011-11-09T22:15:00.000+08:00

WE have to learn to see Christ in everyone, including those with whom we may have serious differences or are in conflict. We have to go beyond seeing others in a purely human way without, of course, neglecting the human and natural in us.

In short, we have to see others in a spiritual way, within the framework of faith, hope and charity. Otherwise we cannot avoid getting entangled in our limited and conflict-prone earthly condition. And no amount of human justice and humanitarianism can fully resolve this predicament.

Thus, we need to develop and hone our skills of looking at others beyond the merely physical, social, economic, cultural or political way. While these aspects are always to be considered, we should not be trapped by them.

There are many reasons for this. First would be that we are all brothers and sisters, created by God in his image and likeness, and made children of his through his grace.

In spite of our differences—race, culture, beliefs, etc.—we are meant to care and love one another. Thus, our Lord told us to “love your neighbour as I have loved you.” (Jn 13,34)

And how did Christ love us? By becoming man and assuming all our sinfulness, dying to it to give us a new life in him. His love was for everyone, and especially for those who were weak and handicapped not so much in the physical sense as in the moral sense.

That’s why he was close to the sinners, fraternizing with them. He would only show his dislike to those who were self-righteous. Just the same, he loved all as proven by the fact that before dying on the cross, he asked forgiveness from his Father for those who crucified him.

We have to expand and deepen our attitudes towards others. Are we willing to think always of them, keenly observant of how they are? Are we moved to pray for them and to leap to their assistance when the chance comes?

Our problem is that we tend to think always of ourselves, and our view of the others is mainly shaped by purely human motives that cannot reach the level of charity that can love everyone regardless of conditions and circumstances.

Let’s remember that as St. Paul said, we have to “bear each other’s burdens.” (Gal 6,2) Do we have that kind of outlook? Are we quick to help others even to the point of inconveniencing ourselves?

We have to start dismantling attitudes, habits and practices that keep us imprisoned in our own world, mistakenly thinking that these actually would make us happy or are good for us.

These past days I had had the luck of meeting simple people who are thinking only of others. I did not hear any negative remark from them about anyone, and frankly, I felt so good talking to them. It was a joy to be with them.

Our problem is that we tend to just gossip and gossip, our mouth and tongue quite on their own with hardly any supervision from a higher agency in our system. We are also affected by our prejudices and biases. Of course, we tend to forget charity when we encounter sharp differences with others.

We have to follow the example of Christ who tried to find something good even in those who were doing wrong. For example, one time he told his disciples to continue observing what their religious leaders taught them, but not to follow their example, because they do not practice what they preach. (cfr Mt 23,2)

He made that distinction between what was taught and what was practiced, and did not lump up the right teaching with the wrong practice. We should be quick to find the right and the good things that can go together with the bad and wrong things.

Even with handling of dishonest money, he showed goodness of heart. Christ recommended that we “make friends with dishonest money,” so that when it fails we can still be welcomed to heaven. (cfr Lk 16,9)

It’s not that we ought to foster dishonesty, but rather to learn how to make do and make use of evil things in this world to do good. This conclusion can be gleaned from the fact that our Lord summarized the whole episode by saying, “No servant can serve two masters...You cannot serve God and mammon.”

We need to be pro-active in seeing Christ in everyone and in eliciting true charity when we relate to them, regardless of the circumstances.

Triviality

2011-11-08T21:41:00.001+08:00

WE have to be careful not to fall to triviality. The profusion of data, images and messages that are now technologically generated and circulated can easily confuse, intoxicate and desensitize us to the point of developing a mentality of triviality—everything would be considered of the same value or nothing is considered serious.

With this attitude, we can lose our sense of balance and direction, priorities are thrown haywire, and we mostly likely would be led only by our senses, feelings, instincts and passions, that at best can only cover so much of the reality we are in.

Even if we still have a good use of our reason and intelligence, we would find it hard to discern the impulses of faith and grace, the promptings of the Holy Spirit that for sure continue to come to us, since our life is always a shared life with God, in spite of our freedom and independence.

In fact, the sense of the sacred vanishes. Faith and religion are not only ignored. They are increasingly attacked, accused of being anti-human. Talking about developing a supernatural outlook is now considered trash talk.

We need to be properly grounded and sober, and at the same time flexible, able to flow with the times that are getting more and more complex. This is now an urgent requirement that should be met fast and adequately. Let’s hope families, schools and other institutions realize this and start to act about it.

Fact is there are now many young people falling to triviality, and a host of other anomalies that usually go with it. To mention a few, we can cite vulgarity, laziness, disorder, addictions that now go beyond substance or drug addiction.

We can now talk about psychological addiction that may be fed mainly by smut and porn. From there, all sorts of perversions can come. And when not promptly corrected, they can spread quickly, causing a kind of epidemic.

And since these irregularities are more moral than organic, more psychological than physical, the urge to justify them can easily take place. This is what we are seeing in some developed countries that are actually getting into decadence. And we are starting to see signs and symptoms of these problems in our country.

In fact, we now have moves to legalize these irregularities in an effort to make these practices the new normal in a new world order where God is stricken out. The world culture is becoming a Godless culture.

St. Paul already warned us of this eventuality. “The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.” (2 Tim 3-4)

We have to see to it that we are properly guided and directed even as we sail through life’s seas. For this, everyone should try to come up with an effective plan, consisting of certain practices of piety organically linked to his daily activities so that the love of God and others would always throb in his heart.

The proper structures and atmosphere in homes, schools, offices, etc. should be created and maintained, so that this plan of piety can really be lived. Very crucial to this would be a continuing program of formation and education that should be pursued in an air of freedom and never of coercion.

Obviously, for this purpose, the Church leaders should be in the forefront. But they should also train others—especially parents and teachers—to be experts in this plan of piety so they, the parents and teachers, can transmit this plan to children and students through their words, actions and the very testimony of their own lives.

In this task of formation, we need to highlight the core truth that all of us who are creatures and children of God actually have a natural longing for God, though that longing is often thwarted by a number of factors. We just have to find ways of recovering it when it is lost, and to reinforce it especially when we face trials.

That formation has to be wholistic, covering the human aspect that is always basic, as well as the doctrinal and spiritual aspects that would include teaching others how to pray, to value sacrifice, to wage a lifelong ascetical struggle, to have recourse to the sacraments, and precisely to take care of their on-going formation.

This formation would prevent us from falling into triviality, with mind focused and heart burning with love.

Laity’s challenge to the clergy

2011-11-06T12:27:00.000+08:00

A NUMBER of times, I have been invited to give talks or preside over some liturgical activities by groups of laymen who have formed themselves together for a spiritual or religious purpose. These invitations are, of course, outside of my regular pastoral assignments.

On these occasions, they can ask me to give some spiritual inputs, if not conduct for them a morning or afternoon of recollection and things like that. When I have the time, I usually accept the requests, and I always end up being moved to see how these lay people are actually hungering for spiritual nourishment.

I notice lately that the invitations have been increasing while my availability has been decreasing, and so I have been refusing these invitations more than accepting them.

This, of course, pains me. It’s undeniable that contrary to some negative and dark reports about people getting secularized, we can also say that there are many people who are trying their best to find God in their daily life. I consider this a marvellous work of the Holy Spirit. There’s a lot of sheep out there looking for their shepherd!

Even youngsters are into this phenomenon. The other day, for example, a group of Filipino-Chinese youth asked me if I could give them some talk. They have been looking for priests, but they could not get one. I was their last resort.

I am sure this wonderful development is caught in the radar of our Church authorities. I remember some years ago that the late Pope John Paul II organized in Rome a gathering of lay groups to highlight this heavenly gift of the laity taking the initiative to strengthen and deepen their spiritual lives.

But I think a lot more has to be done. While it’s true that Church life has to revolve around the parish, especially around the sacraments, most especially around the Holy Eucharist, it’s also true that the Church cannot be confined in these environments.

While it’s true that in the Church, the laity cannot be without the clergy, it is also true that the clergy ought to truly look after the laity in all their spiritual needs. The priests should not just wait for the laity to go to them nor to limit themselves doing strictly liturgical functions.

Spiritual and Church life actually covers the whole range of human life in its different aspects and levels. It cannot be confined simply within church premises and parochial concerns. There is a lot more to it than just restricting it to the sacraments.

The clerics, always indispensable in all these, should know how to be present everywhere, effectively engaging everyone in his spiritual and moral needs. People need to be formed humanly, spiritually, doctrinally, apostolically, professionally, etc., and priests do have a hand in all these.

For example, do priests spend time hearing individual confessions of penitents and giving spiritual direction in a very personal way, as is expected of this delicate practice? These are very important duties that cannot be renounced.

Or are they succumbing to a mere bureaucrat’s mentality, contented only with managing the parish, doing the accounting and the purchasing of materials, etc.?

It’s not so much a matter of physical presence of the priests in the different parts of the world as his adequate spiritual and competent pastoral presence in the world. They have to learn to work in tandem with the lay, knowing the art of functional delegation and supervision.

They have to learn how to accompany everyone in the entirety of his earthly journey, without getting lost or unduly entangled with things. This is a big challenge.

For this, of course, a certain training is needed, starting in the seminary days and going all the way to the never-ending formation of priests even up to their old age. There’s a need to be clear about priorities, since definitely many and all things can demand the attention of priests. And they (we) just have to know how to put order in all of them.

For sure, this will require a continuing study of everyone concerned, with the Church authorities always taking the lead and inspiring everyone to contribute his observations and suggestions. They have to know how to get the act together.

With world developments getting faster-paced and more complex, bishops and priests have to do some retooling to cope with the emerging challenges. And yes, also greater sacrifices, more heroic generosity of one’s time, talents and resources.

We all have to discern more keenly what the Holy Spirit is telling us.

Games and gadgets generation

2011-11-01T12:03:00.000+08:00

WE need to be aware of this disturbing characteristic of our young generation, and even the not so young. There is strong evidence that many of the youth today are hooked on games and gadgets. They are swallowed up by a fever called distraction and are falling into varying forms of addiction.

There is no focus. There is no long-range, let alone, over-all view of things. Concern for others is evaporating. In their stead, we find a trend of aimless drifting, of immediate and instant satisfaction of wants, of inventing more whims and caprices, of a hardening of an anomaly called self-centeredness.

Temperance, self-discipline, spirit of sacrifice and a healthy form of detachment from things are cast out. Fortitude and determination seem to be regarded as disvalues since the young ones prefer to go soft and easy always, guided only by instincts, feelings and passions.

And so duties like praying, studying, helping around in the house, serving others, etc. are often forgotten. The art of serious thinking and reflection is hardly learned, and can now be covered more easily through the cut-and-paste technology and other forms of cheating that many of the young people are also skilled at.

To help in solving this predicament, we need to look at our own personal lives first, to see if things are working as they should—like whether our spiritual life is in shape, our values in proper order, our virtues alive and developing, our control of our weakness and temptations effective, etc.

We can only aspire to help the young ones if we ourselves, the elders, are in the condition to help. We can only help if our attitudes, thoughts, words, action and example are vitally connected to the ultimate source of life, goodness and love—God. Otherwise, we would just contribute to the worsening of the situation.

Are we praying? Are we able to integrate all aspects of our lives under the impulse of grace and the love of God and neighbor? Does truth, as ultimately coming from our faith, reign in our lives, or are we just contented with practical and temporal principles and guidelines? Do we always come up with effective resolutions daily?

How is our behavior in all the different situations of our life—in good times and bad times, in successes and failures? Can we say that our example could truly edify the young? And can they also say we are authentic men and women of God?

We have to understand that helping the young and provoking a transformation in society and the world would always start and end with each of our personal selves. Things don’t work any other way. But obviously we also need the support of higher entities.

Thus, from our own personal selves, we have to look into the health and vitality of the families, so crucial in developing the young ones. Are they functional? Do parents and children spend time together? Are parents, the first teachers to their children, able to fulfill their duties toward them properly?

Everything has to be done to strengthen family life that starts with the love of the spouses and parents, protecting and reinforcing marriage and fidelity, respecting life in all its stages and conditions, from womb to tomb. Let’s be wary of immoral legislations like the proposed RH Bill.

How about the schools? Do they include in their curricula not only academic subjects but also elements that would contribute to the genuine development of the students’ character? Are they also teaching faith and morals aside from the practical sciences?

Do schools produce not only knowledgeable and skillful graduates but better and mature persons, because they are all at once loving children to their parents, competent workers, patient and compassionate friends to their friends and colleagues, dutiful and loyal citizens to their country and, above all, faithful children of God?

We need to see to it also that the environment around would always be conducive to a healthy lifestyle for the young and for everybody else? Is the media helping in creating a clean, positive and encouraging surrounding? Are we rid of billboards and other ads that give confusing if not outright wrong messages?

And the government? It has a big role to play in all this. Does it go beyond bureaucratic effectiveness and legalistic norms to really engage itself with the true core of the issues that would always be respectful of their moral implications?

We need to get our act together, putting all these elements in synergy, so we can truly help the young.

Battle for formation

2011-10-31T14:01:00.000+08:00

WE will always have issues to resolve, problems to solve, endless challenges to face and tackle, and that’s why we need to realize that we have to be adequately prepared for them by undertaking a lifelong battle for formation.

Social, political and economic issues will always be around. At the moment, the world is going through a phase of intense change and tension. The current standards and systems seem to be cracking up in the face of new, emerging problems. Things look like we are rife for a drastic paradigm shift in our earthly affairs.

Yes, we need to be keyed up for all this. At the very least, we need to be instructed, informed, educated, and more than these, we need to toughen our spirit not only to absorb the tremendous pressures but also to eke out a new way, a higher level of human and global development.

This is where our need for formation enters. We have to go beyond simply accumulating data and discovering and exploring human sciences and technologies. No matter how indispensable they are, they are not enough.

Without proper formation, we most likely will abuse or misuse our sophisticated scientific and technological products. It’s like giving a little child some matches to play with, or an adolescent too much money to go around.

We need to pay attention to the proper maturity of our spirit, the only thing capable of seeing through and fathoming all these challenges. And of survival, since no matter what happens to the world it’s the spirit that will transcend our death and bring everything else in us to our ultimate end, God, if we still abide by our faith.

We have to be positive about all these fast events. We have to get out of the dark fear-and-anxiety syndrome, and instead get into a sense of adventure, brightened by hope and confidence.

And trust in God, because after everything is said and done, the only thing left for us if everything else has to fail, is God, our faith and trust in him. This is what formation means. All our effort and pursuit for human knowledge and conquest should immerse us more in God, rather than in ourselves, in our power and ways.

We should never forget this. We have to outgrow that bias of pitting the human against the divine, the natural against the supernatural, the material against the spiritual. In short, man against God.

This bias, known also as secularism, relativism, materialism, etc., has been afflicting the world for quite some time now. It’s already begging to be dismantled. We need to acknowledge both the unity and distinction between these dualities—their inner, inherent relations among themselves and their respective autonomy.

We have to double-time in this need for formation, because it has been neglected for long and is awfully lagging behind. It’s unfortunate that many big schools and universities are giving more attention to secular sciences while practically ignoring religion.

Our formation should help us discover God in everything we do or get involved in. Since we come from God and belong to God, we have to understand that all our thoughts, words and deeds should also begin and end with God, as expressed in many of our liturgical prayers.

All our similarities and differences, our agreements and disagreements, our successes and failures, the correct and the wrong things we do in our earthly affairs should not compromise our love for God. On the contrary, they should make us love God more.

We should not be contented with our own ideas alone, no matter how brilliant and practical they may be. Without God, these ideas and initiatives would lack their proper foundation and purpose.

They would just be at the mercy of men’s machinations, and that can only mean immorality, not just because of our limitations, but mainly because of the temptations and pressures around.

In the study and research, the experimentation and instruction involved in our formation, we have to see to it that the abiding attitude should be to know and love God better, and to get a deeper understanding of God’s plan for the world.

They should not just be pursued purely on so-called scientific or rational motives, because without being grounded and oriented toward God, they can only give us dangerous and confusing signals.

This formation will also lead us to truly live charity, with its companions of justice and mercy, since doing things with God and for God will bring us to love everybody else as God wants them to be loved.

Governing and obeying

2011-10-30T07:34:00.001+08:00

WE need to take a closer look at our understanding and attitude towards these unavoidable human affairs of governing and obeying, leading and following. While in general there is still an observable stability in this area of our social life, we cannot deny that a lot of problems also hound it.

We should not wait for things to degenerate into a big crisis before we start correcting basic misconceptions and wrong attitudes and ways in it. Disturbing symptoms are gathering in families, offices, schools, dioceses and parishes, and of course, the country in general. We can commence clarifying issues now.

Truth is, this business of governing and obeying has been detached from its proper foundation, context and purpose. Instead of basing it on our human nature and God’s design for us, it simply operates under the impulses of sheer practicality and convenience that cannot avoid the play of dirty tricks and deception.

Instead of doing it in its ethical and moral context and purpose, it cannot help getting trapped by human machinations and schemes. It seems it’s not anymore a matter of whether something is right or wrong, fair or unfair. It’s more whether it is smart and clever, period.

Because of these, both those who govern and those who obey get suspicious and uneasy with each other in varying degrees until they reach a flash point. Those who govern tend to abuse their power. Those who obey feel taken advantage of. Those who govern think they are better than those who have to obey.

Lost is the original reality that both governing and obeying are actually two sides of the same coin, different in function but equal in dignity, since they correspond to our human need to organize ourselves in any level of society.

They are supposed to be done out of love so that the common good can be attained. Outside of this context and purpose, we would be distorting things and generate wrong attitudes and working and living habits.

Sad to say, these are what we are seeing aplenty these days. Governing cannot seem to avoid the trappings of pride, arrogance and vanity. Its idea of leading and managing is easily contaminated with a control mentality, instead of doing it as sincere service and enhancing the free cooperation of the others.

Obeying is seen as an assault to freedom, and is given mainly because of a monetary price or other material and worldly considerations. It’s hardly viewed as fostering one’s personal dignity. It’s over-all effect on one’s soul is more negative than positive.

No one, strictly speaking, whether he governs or he obeys, is superior or inferior to the other. The unavoidable ranking in our society is just a functional necessity, given our human condition. It does not erase the basic equality among all of us.

There is still a lot of clarification, purification and enrichment to be done in our culture so that it can reach the fullness of its understanding regarding governing and obeying. We need to liberate this part of our culture from its parochial framework. It has to be updated, since it seems trapped in the ancient past of pagan culture.

This Christian concept of governing and obeying can flow from St. Paul’s description of the different parts of the body working together in different ways for the good of the body.

That’s in Chapter 12 of his First Letter to the Corinthians (12,12ff) where he also said that those parts that seem to be feeble, less honorable and uncomely are actually more necessary and ought to be given more honor and comeliness.

But, alas, these Christian refinements are hardly reflected in our culture where there is a strong fascination and lusting for dominating others, for public and earthly honors, for positioning, and where manual work is automatically considered as lowly if not demeaning and inhuman.

Thus, it made a big, indelible impression on me when as a young college student back in the 70s, I witnessed for the first time in a very clear, patent way, how this Christian and human way of governing and obeying in a spiritually inspired organization I got involved in was lived.

I saw how the head of the organization became one day the gardener of the house, and vice-versa. The switch was just in a matter of a day, and I didn’t see any trace of crisis on the faces of those involved. On the contrary, they were both happy and eager to take on the responsibilities.

That observation changed me deeply.

Our need for death

2011-10-27T21:14:00.001+08:00

NOVEMBER again is here, and like an automatic reaction, thanks to our long Christian tradition, our thoughts go to those who have gone ahead of us, whose remains we visit in the cemeteries or columbaries.

It’s a moving sight that bespeaks of our faith in the life after death. Thanks to God, the mystery that shrouds death and even our own shortcomings, mistakes and sins, cannot dispel such faith.

We just have to go deeper in our knowledge about death. For this, we need the our Christian faith to guide us, so we can have the proper attitude and understanding of what some saints have regarded as Sister Death who is joyfully welcomed.

We should not be afraid of death. In fact, we have to expect it and prepare ourselves for it. It cannot be avoided anyway. But even more significant is that we have to realize that we need it. Therefore, our attitude should be that of longing for it, and not just waiting for it and even wanting to escape from it.

This was the attitude of Christ. “Jesus, knowing that his hour was come, that he should pass out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” (Jn13,1)

It should be ours too. Of course, with Christ, who has complete and perfect knowledge and control of his life and death, we can say it is understandable. But we also need to understand that we actually have to conform our attitude toward death to that of Christ’s.

We would be out on a limb in our attitude toward death if we fail to refer it to Christ’s death. We’d be left only with our shallow and narrow human understanding of it, crawling with fears, sadness and a host of intense emotions that would still miss the origin and purpose of our death.

There might be a tinge of faith infused into it, but a faith that is more of a wish out of desperation than one with any objective basis. It’s time we outgrow this kind of attitude and understanding.

If we have already conquered many frontiers of human sciences and technology, we should start conquering our last frontier of death—not by any human science and technology though, but by faith, and by God’s grace.

That is not a presumptuous, gratuitous claim. In the beginning, as our faith teaches us, we were not meant to die. Nor in the end of time are we supposed to die. There is going to be the resurrection of the dead, a truth of faith that is now a mystery incapable of being proven and verified in a human way.

Death came because of the sin of men, first, that of our aboriginal parents which we inherited, and of course our own personal sins. But this death has been conquered by Christ through the cross. “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.” (1 Cor 15,22)

We have to understand that our death should not be understood simply as the end of our earthly life, the failure of our physical health. Our death is much more than that. It has a deep theological meaning that we should try to be more familiar with, since we have a big part to play in that death.

Yes, we have to work for our death. We just cannot wait for it to come, and even try to dodge it if we can.

In this, we can try to develop the attitude Christ had toward death, expressed in his words: “No one takes my life away from me. I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” (Jn 10,18)

How did Christ die? By dying on the cross, which means he assumed all the sins of men, from beginning to end, big and small, and died to them only to resurrect and win over sin and death on the third day.

Our faith teaches that if we die with Christ, we will also resurrect with him. Dying with Christ means dying to our sin. In other words, we need to be dead to sin, so we can resurrect with Christ.

Thus, in his first letter, St. Peter said: “Christ bore our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice.” (2,24)

This is the death we need to accomplish—our death to sin!

Silence and noisy mass actions

2011-10-20T10:31:00.000+08:00

WE are now witnessing the spread of protest actions all over the world. The latest is the Occupy Wall Street that from New York has gone to many cities and communities in the US and has leapt beyond the boundary to go as far as Rome.

Social observers say it has been inspired by the Arab Spring phenomenon and other rallies and demonstrations in Europe like in Greece and Spain. Previous to these was the Tea Party movement in the States that also left a deep dent in the national political terrain.

We are not strangers to these mass actions. We had our share that culminated in the now world-famous People Power. But to be sure, their differences far outnumber their similarities, and so we have to be careful in assessing them. They are not all the same. They have different ethos that inspire them.

It’s clear that the world is entering a new phase in history as it grapples with new challenges that go beyond the simply ideological differences of yesteryears. The issues focus more on micro domestic concerns that were widely taken for granted before and now have grown to cancerous proportions.

Again, let’s hope that these developments will trigger the earnest search for the appropriate solutions. For this to happen of course, we need a new breed of leaders, if not a new culture that incorporates better the spiritual and supernatural dimensions of our life.

At the moment, what is more important to consider is that while these mass actions have their importance and relevance, we need to realize also that personal silence is necessary for any true development and improvement to take place not only in one’s personal life, but also in that of society.

Without this aspect in our lifestyle, we are prone to thoughtless and rash actions that can end up in riots and violence. We can cause more harm than good even if we have the best intentions.

Pope Benedict has something very interesting and intriguing to say about this. In a recent visit with Carthusian monks, he proposed that everyone needs to have silence and solitude in order to get in touch with reality.

He said that without silence and solitude, we risk in failing to experience God who is the author of reality. That is when we start to distort the meaning and purpose of our life here on earth. That is when, in his terms, virtuality can overtake reality.

To him, silence and solitude are not a way of isolating ourselves. Rather, it is the opposite. They are meant to foster our union with God, and through God, our link with all the others and with everything else in the world.

That is why he told the Carthusians that their way of life has something to share with the rest of humanity who now are in danger of what he termed as “anthropological mutation,” a drastic, erroneous change in the understanding of what man is.

This is a challenge that we have to face now—how to purify and enrich our culture so that this human need for silence and solitude become functional in our active life of work and other earthly concerns we have.

We have to be clear about one thing—that no amount of mass actions, even if they are successful in social, economic or political terms, can substitute our need for a living contact with God that we can have through silence and solitude.

Even the expressions of popular piety that, thanks to God, we still have in abundance in our country—for example, the vast devotion to the Sto. Nino, the Black Nazarene, and many other Marian devotions—cannot replace this need for silence and solitude.

Given our human condition that includes a realistic consideration of our weaknesses and sinfulness, we need silence and solitude to be able to discern the spiritual and supernatural realities that govern us and that are a key to knowing the objective reality.

We are prone to be overrun by our emotions and passions, and so our thinking and reasoning are often compromised. Our judgments and decisions are also affected by the effects of our sins, ours and those of the others that sometimes become so widespread that we can now talk about “structures of sin.”

Silence and solitude enable us to attain what St. Paul once proposed to us: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever of good fame,… think on these things…and the God of peace shall be with you.” (Phil 4,8-9)

Message and messenger

2011-10-19T14:58:00.000+08:00

ROGER Ailes, president of Fox News and today’s superstar in American media precisely because of the many smart moves he made that transformed America’s media and political culture drastically, wrote a book some years ago entitled, “You are the message.”

I must say that, given our human condition, it’s an exaggerated interpretation of how the relationship should be between the message and the messenger. But it’s actually the ideal to pursue, the ideal that was lived perfectly in Christ, the Word made man. But this will require a long explanation that can be done some other time.

The book’s thesis is a good antidote to a pronounced bias of many of our media practitioners who easily claim that the message should be completely separated from the messenger. While there is a grain of truth to this, it’s also wrong to say that both message and messenger have to be entirely divorced. The messenger is at least part of the message.

Truth to tell, it is only in Christ where the message and the messenger are completely identified with each other. In spite of that, many, many people question that claim for one reason or another, giving us the strong idea that it is not popularity that would determine if indeed a messenger has become the message. It’s something else.

Anyway, to Ailes’ credit, he managed to weave a strong argument to prove that indeed the messenger is practically the message. We have to take this reasoning for what it’s worth. It has its brilliant points, though again, I believe it should not be taken as the ultimate criterion or reason.

Here is how a review describes the book:

"You are the message." What does that mean, exactly? It means that when you communicate with someone, it's not just the words you choose to send to the other person that make up the message. You're also sending signals about what kind of person you are—by your eyes, your facial expression, your body movement, your vocal pitch, tone, volume, and intensity, your commitment to your message, your sense of humor, and many other factors.

“The receiving person is bombarded with symbols and signals from you. Everything you do in relation to other people causes them to make judgments about what you stand for and what your message is. "You are the message" comes down to the fact that unless you identify yourself as a walking, talking message, you miss that critical point.

“The words themselves are meaningless unless the rest of you is in synchronization. The total you affects how others think of and respond to you.”

It’s for these reasons that Ailes formulated some criteria that would make a messenger effective in delivering his message. He mentioned likability, authenticity and honesty. In our communications, whether in public or private, we should try our best to be likable—in the sense of being warm, etc.—and authentic and honest. And we have to worry about how to sustain these qualities, so we can retain the interest of our audience.

The others should see that we are identifying ourselves with our message, that we are not just acting as indifferent messengers. And that’s why, whatever the message is, whether we are for it or against it or neutral to it, that position has to be shown somehow, and the audience should be able to decipher why we have such position.

If we are to follow that paradigm and still want to be consistent to our genuine Christian identity, I believe that the ultimate and constant criteria to guide us should be, as always, charity.

It should be charity banked on truth and fairness and prudence, which is actually an ongoing affair that does not exclude trial and error, successes and failures. So we need to be sport and magnanimous here.

In this regard, I think it would do all of us well if in the usual run of our public discussions and debates of issues, where differences and conflicts are unavoidable, we can manage to show this charity all the time.

We have to try our best not to insist so much on our opinions, no matter how right and better we think our views may be over those of the others. We always need to give allowance to those who differ from us.

At the worst scenario, we have to learn to agree to disagree, converting the differences as occasions of mutual enrichment rather than of division, and to allow time and other elements to resolve things later.

Personal but not individualistic

2011-10-16T17:50:00.001+08:00

WE need to distinguish between what a person is and what an individual is. This distinction is crucial, since it will guide us to live our life properly. What attitudes to develop, how to behave, how to react as we should, would depend on our understanding of this distinction.

For sure, a person is an individual in the sense that he is one and quite unique. But he is much more than just an individual. He is not just a quantity.

A point in the Catechism of the Catholic Church says something relevant. “Being in the image of God, the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone.” (357)

The Catechism explains further, shedding light on the difference between a something and a someone.

The human person who is a someone and not just a something is “capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons.

“And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead.”

This doctrine is important because it tells us about a fundamental and inalienable truth about ourselves. And we have to do everything to uphold it, develop it to the max, drawing all the practical consequences and implications from it, and protect and defend it.

These days, with all the confusion around, not to mention the clear trend to downgrade our dignity as persons, the duty to understand and uphold this doctrine, protect and defend it, has become urgent. It is in great need to be taught to the four winds.

One essential element of a person is that he is always in relation with God, his Creator, and with others. He is never alone. He should not be, though he can choose to be. And that is the problem we all have.

We have to understand that we become more and more of a person the more we develop these relationships, according to the law given to us by our Creator. And this law is articulated first in the natural moral law enshrined in the Ten Commandments, and later in the teachings of Christ who is the fullness of the revelation of God, our Creator, to us.

In other words, we should all strive to be always personal, and never be individualistic. Even when we are alone physically, our mind and heart, our intelligence and will, which are the spiritual faculties given to us and which make us God’s image and likeness, should always be engaged with God and with others.

That is why, these days there’s a lot of call for transparency which I view as a reaction to our strong tendency to be by ourselves, prone to playing all sorts of games and tricks. It has led many of us to such anomalies as corruption, deception, laziness, complacency, etc.

In fact, it’s when we cut ourselves off from God and from others that we become easy prey to the varying forms of the capital sins: pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth.

Pride alone has countless manifestations, often subtle and very insidious. There is intellectual pride, for example, that afflicts many of our bright minds who confine their intelligence to their own will, if not to their own passions and emotions, alienating themselves from the ultimate and permanent source of truth who is God.

It’s this intellectual pride that sets the world in an orbit entirely on its own, leading us to increasingly precarious situations. What’s happening nowadays in the more developed Western countries where a crisis of seismic proportion is gathering, is testament to this pride-induced fragility.

Much of their culture considers leadership as domination instead of as service. Authority becomes a tool of control instead of a sharing in God’s power and love and everything related to it—justice, mercy, peace and order, solidarity, etc.

Obedience is seen as absence of freedom, while civil disobedience, just a step short of anarchy, now appears as the sole expression of freedom. Discipline and sacrifice are completely deprived of any positive value, while spontaneity and self-assertion seem to have no danger at all.

We need to revitalize our sense of person, and overcome the tendency to plunge to individualism, so we can get properly grounded, engaged and oriented. We need to look closely at how we are thinking and willing all throughout the day. Are we with God and others, or just by ourselves?

Vigilance requires temperance

2011-10-12T21:49:00.001+08:00

AN old love song can express what ought to be a longing deep inside our spiritual life.

“How can you keep the music playing,” it starts. “How can you make it last / How can you keep the song from fading too fast…”

Set in a haunting melody, the song reflects a deep sentiment of the heart that wants love to stay permanent in the dynamic flow of life, to remain clear and definite instead of tentative and provisional.

But the tenor of the song can also be applied to our spiritual yearning. Since our life is a shared life with God, we need to find ways to put ourselves always in the presence of God, filled with love and a burning desire to do good.

These days, this ideal is getting more elusive because not only bad things separate us from God, but also good things, if we are not vigilant, can take us away from him, instead of leading us to him.

Take the case of the new wonders of the digital world. In themselves they are not bad. They are good. They offer many practical uses. And they generate a seemingly self-propelled force to discover more potentials and possibilities that look endless.

But precisely because of this character, the digital charm can intoxicate us. We can get so entrapped in its technological and pragmatic loop that instead of living with God, we would simply be living by ourselves, exclusively seeking our own interests instead of seeking God.

That is why it is good to be reminded of the virtue of temperance. To be vigilant, to keep our music with God playing, we need to be practice restraint and moderation in the use of material and earthly things, no matter how good in themselves they may be.

Temperance makes sure that we are not overrun by the workings of our human flesh and of our material world. It makes sure that our material and earthly condition is properly fused to our spiritual and supernatural goal.

Temperance helps us to submit our temporal and human affairs not only to right reason, but also and most especially to our Christian faith, hope and charity. It poises our heart to soar to its spiritual and divine goal. It helps our active life to be contemplative as well, unifying the mundane with the sacred.

Temperance frees our heart from being shackled to merely mundane concerns, and leaves it open to receive spiritual promptings continuously. This is how to “lose yourself to someone / and never losing your way,” as the song goes. This is how “not to run out of new things to say.”

Even in marital and family life, vigilance and temperance are always needed. If a husband and father, for example, succumbs to workaholism and neglects his wife and children, disaster in marriage and family would just be a matter of time, if things are not corrected.

If the husband spends more and more time in the office and fails to give reassuring words of love and affection to his wife, the once fervent love would just grow cold, wane and eventually die. There can be other aggravating side-dramas besides.

If the father sees his children less and less, there can come a time when he can be a stranger to his own offsprings. He will get stuck in the level of generics in family life, failing to descend to the specifics, slowly emptying the family of its true substance, love.

We need to see to it that our heart escapes from being dominated and enslaved by the charms and magic of the world. It has to deny itself frequently, as our Lord said, and take up the cross. It has to learn to enter by the narrow gate, instead of just drifting easily to the wide gate.

We should see to it that our mind and heart never lose their attachment to God. In fact, the reverse should be encouraged. That attachment should grow stronger each day, looking for creative ways to make it vibrant.

Our concerns, affairs, the things that we handle should bring us closer to God and to others, instead of taking us farther from them. For this reason, there can be occasions—and they can be many—when we have to say no to certain activities, or to certain thoughts and words, because we need to pray, to go to Mass, confession, etc.

This is part of temperance that helps keep our vigilance alive, so that we keep on playing music with God.

Reason for our hope

2011-10-11T17:57:00.000+08:00

THAT'S what St. Peter strongly recommended. “Be ready always to satisfy everyone that asks you a reason of that hope which is in you.” (1 Pt 3,15) Especially these days when the Christian way of life is constantly questioned, we need to give uncommon attention to this Petrine indication.

Of course, we have to understand that since our hope is based on our faith and is also expressed in charity—these three, faith, hope and charity, always go together—we are actually being asked to give reason for our faith and our charity also.

We also have to understand that our human reason, while a most powerful tool we have, has its limits. Therefore we cannot expect it to prove everything about our faith, hope and charity. What it can do is to give some convincing arguments that would lend credibility to our faith, hope and charity.

While we are rational beings, we have to realize that we are actually much more than being rational. We are made for believing, hoping and loving. What we know, what we accept as truths just cannot be confined to reasoning and arguments alone.

It would be wrong to confine ourselves to reason alone, although reason we have to use always. But we have to acknowledge its limitations, otherwise, we would fall into what is tantamount to making ourselves the ultimate source of truth, which is a self-evident falsehood.

Anyway, it's actually loving—charity—that would make us know and accept truths that surpass our capacity to reason. Charity has ways that go beyond what our reason can reach. It's what can tackle mysteries which we cannot avoid and which we cannot fully understand.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this relevant point to serve as context of what we are saying here so far. I beg the indulgence of our readers to go through this long point which I believe would richly reward our effort.

“In the historical conditions in which he finds himself,” the Catechism teaches, “man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone.

“Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and ligh of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God...there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty.

“For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation.

“The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin.

“So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.” (CCC 37)

Given this situation, what we can do is to have recourse to spiritual and supernatural means—prayers, sacrifice, acts of charity, recourse to the sacraments, doctrinal formation, etc.—without neglecting the use of reason to explain why we behave according to Christian faith, hope and charity.

This is actually a very demanding task that requires nothing less than an authentic spiritual life nourished by grace and an endless interior struggle to fight against temptations and sin, develop virtues, deepen our knowledge of the doctrine of our faith, etc.

For sure, giving reason to our faith, hope and charity cannot just be a purely intellectual affair. I have witnessed great minds failing to convince people of their faith precisely because they only offer arguments without a living testimony of a consistent, genuine Christian life.

I have also witnessed simple minds who, radiating with true sanctity, offered arguments that, while simple, immediately go to the hearts of those around them. They manage to convince and convert difficult individuals, inspiring souls to go to higher levels of holiness.

The theology they used might not have the aura and rigor of systematic theology, but it's solid theology they used, expressed in forms that promptly read and capture the needs of specific persons at a given moment.

We therefore have to understand that this Petrine dictum to be prepared to give reason to our Christian faith, hope and charity is more a call to authentic sanctity than just an invitation to be intellectually formed.

Saints, like St. John Mary Vianney, are examples of this phenomenon.

How to handle our own will

2011-10-10T11:10:00.001+08:00

NO doubt, our own will is the most important faculty we have. Who we are, what and how we are, are largely determined by our will. It’s our will that gives meaning and direction to our life.

While God gives us our objective identity and governs us with his divine providence, we cannot deny the fact that we are also who we want to be, what and how we choose ourselves to be.
Our human will is the seat of our freedom that enables us to go wherever we want to go, and even to be what we want to be. Where our will turns is where we are going to be. It’s the rudder of our boat of life.

We may be pressured and influenced by external factors—culture, environment, weather, fashion, etc.—but with our will, we have a capacity to be beyond all these pressures, and above all these conditionings.

It is in our will that we declare ourselves to be our own man. No one and nothing can enter it, if we don’t allow it to enter. It’s in our will that we can be in our most private moment, and isolated from everything and everybody else.

But, alas, this is where the crucial question that involves all of us emerges. This is where the most fundamental reality of our life comes to light.

No one can deny that even if we have the capacity to be on our own, quite private, independent and isolated, we also know that our will did not self-generate, nor could it function in a vacuum, in an absolute independence of others.

Our will is something given and received, and it is always in need of some elements of reference for it to function. It is the acknowledgement of this truth that we start to touch base with reality. Otherwise, we would start to invent a fantasy, confining ourselves in some prison of subjectivism.

We need to find the ultimate source and end of our will, and from there learn how to use it within its proper framework and law. That’s why, our will by nature is always looking for a God—the objective God or our own version of God.

How important therefore it is to take extreme care of how we handle our will. We just cannot use it at random, as in exercising at a wisp of a whim or a passing fancy. Our will needs to be properly grounded and oriented.

We just cannot allow it to be dominated or even largely influenced by physical or biological factors, or by feelings and passions and things of the flesh, or by merely social, economic, cultural or political elements.

It has to enter into some dialogue with God, no matter how mysterious that dialogue is going to be. The very least thing that we can do is to acknowledge that there is God and that we need to be with him.

We may not know much about him yet, nor feel anything special about him yet, but we can always put ourselves in his presence. From there, we can progress in our effort to know and love him more intimately.

Thus, we can start by simply following the commandments that are the first and general articulation of God’s will to us. We can start offering things to him, things that are done according to these defined commandments.

From there, we can start to figure out the finer points of his will by constantly asking him what he really wants us to know and do at any given moment. This means we have to be in a constant mode of prayer, which we can do in different ways depending on the circumstances we are in.

The problem we have today is that many of us do things with hardly any reference to God’s will. That’s why we cannot persevere in doing good, in going all the way in the pursuit of justice, charity, etc. We can start well, but we get stuck somewhere.

We need to listen to what our Lord told those who prided themselves in doing good but could not believe in him: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (Lk 11,23)

Regardless of the many “good” things we appear to be doing in our work or study, if we are not with God, we simply “scatter.”

Let’s always imitate our Lady who said: “Be it done to me according to your word!”

RH is unreasonably expensive!

2011-10-06T18:45:00.001+08:00

NOW it can be told. And it needed Senator Lito Lapid who is supposed to be not known for his speaking prowess to get this data. The budget for the implementation of RH for the year 2012 alone is—hold your breath—P13.7B!

According to experts, that figure is even higher than the individual budgets of the departments of energy, finance, foreign affairs, justice, labor, science, tourism and trade. It’s even bigger than those proposed for the Office of the President and Congress, and the entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

OMG! What a waste of tax money that would be! What distorted sense of priority! And to think that the RH Bill does not even pass the preliminary smell test of morality, and the fact that many of its provisions are redundant since they are already covered in many other laws of the land!

We cannot help but suspect there’s something serious that is hidden under the beautiful features with which the RH is marketed to the public. We have to look more closely at this initiative now forcefully pushed by women senators with radical feminist agendas.

We already know that US Secretary Hillary Clinton admitted that RH by definition includes abortion. So even if our version does not include abortion yet, we can suspect that it would just be a matter of time before this evil gets legalized under RH. In fact, there are now many people in the country openly voicing their support for abortion.

We also know from some declassified document that the US has been eyeing the Philippines for quite sometime now for birth control. It’s part of the geo-political game that the US is playing.

That’s why our Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile is suspicious about the RH Bill as being not so much for reproductive health as a tool to effect birth and population control.

And under the current American leadership, there is also a strong lobby for RH not only in the US but also all over the world. In the US alone, part of the Obamacare program forces everyone to get medical insurance that includes paying for sterilization, contraception and even abortion—all against Catholic moral teaching.

This has led American bishops to call this Obamacare provision as an “unprecedented attack on religious liberty.” It is forcing Catholics to support something that is against their religion. It is not anymore tolerating people to do what they like, even if it is against religion. It is forcing them to support what is against their religion.

The current American scene seems to be drifting toward creating a welfare state, with the government taking a bigger role in people’s lives, clearly going against the social principles of common good, solidarity and subsidiarity. It is not only spoiling people. It is forcing people to get spoiled.

And to think that the American political leaders pride themselves of being the first promoters of democracy and religious freedom and teach other countries to follow them! They have to be clear about these in their own country first.

The Philippines would be in a funny situation if it would just blindly follow the American model of RH. That is why, we need to closely monitor the proceedings of the proposed legalization of the RH Bill. This issue has gone beyond the field of group advocacy. It has become a concern for all of us.

I would suggest that the true picture of the RH Bill be shown, discussed and, if need be, debated upon in schools, parishes, offices and even in families. We have to be warned about a subtle but persistent campaign to change the concept of morality itself and to recast the social principles that should govern our national life.

We are now entering a stage of world history where the issues that we need to resolve are not anymore strictly social, economic or political in nature. They now have a fundamentally moral character and they call for a fundamentally moral resolution.

We need to stop and reverse this slippery slope to a deeper secularized world culture that tackles human affairs from a restrictive frame of economics and politics alone, and ignoring the most basic aspect of religion and our inner beliefs.

I must say that we have been had for a long time by this questionable kind of culture that tends to separate reason from faith, science from religion, our human affairs from God. The state is made to conflict with the Church.

While there is distinction, there is also inherent connection between them!

‘There be dragons’

2011-10-05T16:02:00.002+08:00

NOW in the rounds of premiere showings—in Cebu, it will be on October 16 at the Ayala Theatre—the movie depicts the story of St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, with some fiction to highlight and encapsulate the Christian message that while nothing much can be done toward the past, a lot can still be done in the future.

It’s a drama of hope and redemption extracted from a deep morass of skepticism, hatred, envy and many other forms of human weakness. Director Roland Joffe, who also wrote the script, managed to weave an absorbing story with a happy ending that’s won at a great and painful price.

‘There be dragons’ ably reflects the drama of our life, of our history. The film starts with images of a primitive mapamundi where only the then-discovered lands could be sketched, and the outlying areas--the unknown world--are designated as the dark place of the dragons.

The image can refer to the unknown and mysterious parts of our life which events and circumstances can unravel to us, and can provoke different reactions depending on where we anchor our heart and mind on.

If one is led by faith, then the darkness of life cannot fully erase its guiding light. But if one is simply led by his own reasoning, and worse, by his own emotions and passions, then life can only take us to unavoidable perdition.

No matter how bright and clever one might be, without God, he can never grasp the true meaning and essence of life.

In fact, what is likely to happen is to use one’s powers to destroy himself. And this can be done through a complicated process that is guided by brilliant but deceiving and false lights produced by those powers.

The movie plays out this phenomenon very well. Two friends who were very close to each other in childhood started to take different paths as they grew and encountered more or less similar events and circumstances.

The differences later became big and seemingly irreconcilable. But St. Josemaria persisted in his faith that flowered in charity in its most mature of stage of compassion and forgiveness. That faith and charity would eventually win back his friend who took a different route.

The story of St. Josemaria reminds us that it is only with God that we can somehow assume a comprehensive view and understanding of life, in spite of the riddles and mysteries, the strange twists and turns embedded in it.

God shares this knowledge by giving us faith that has to be lived in hope and in charity. The mysteries of faith can somehow be fathomed, even if they cannot be expressed in words, when they are pursued with hope and charity, with goodness of heart no matter how awkward and imperfect that charity and goodness may be.

Charity, the ultimate law and guiding light of our life, the full blossoming of our faith, is what can conquer all--our doubts, fear, cynicism, hatred, resentment, etc. St. Paul precisely affirmed it when he said: “Charity bears with all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Charity never fails…” (1 Cor 13,7-8)

But, alas, this is a truth that I’m afraid is still unknown by many of us. It’s still in the outlying areas designated for ‘dragons’ in our life. That is why, the movie somehow also reminds us that we need to wage serious and constant battle against our weakness and the temptations around.

Again this is something to be encouraged in all of us. Interior struggle is an integral part of our life here in this world, which is a life of discovery, of trial, of making the ultimate choice of whether we are for God or for ourselves alone.

In this lifetime struggle, which we try to do with naturalness, we should do all we can to win. All is fair in love and in war, though we have to understand that we can wage effective war only in a moral way. Let’s remember that we are ranged against powerful ‘dragons.’

We need to identify our spiritual enemies at the moment—our laziness, lust, greed, lack of faith, etc.--then craft an adequate strategy, then off we go, doing those spiritual combats that are necessary in this life.

For as long as we are willing to stretch our faith into charity, and our charity into its real source and power which is God’s love as revealed, lived and taught to us by Christ, then all will be ok. Victory is assured!

Silence in communication

2011-10-03T15:46:00.001+08:00

I WAS at first amused, then turned serious, when I learned that the theme of next year’s World Communications Day is Silence and Word, Path of Evangelization. Pope Benedict suggests that those in the communications business observe silence also.

I immediately thought of the tongue-loose radio commentators whose daily views on issues and events must have come under such pressure that we would be lucky if we could get an inch of substance from a mile of words they say on the airwaves.

There is so much shallowness, inanities, bias and outright commercialism that it’s a surprise the environment is not yet that polluted. When they run out of ideas, which is often, they take refuge in poking fun at personalities, if not resort to risqué jokes and double entendre statements.

Their behaviour many times reminds me of what St. Paul once said: “Guard against foul talk. Let your words be for the improvement of others, as occasion offers, and do good to your listeners...” (Eph 4, 29)

Then in the newspapers, mostly in the provinces where they don’t have much resources, you can see public opinion contributors straining to the extreme to make something of real value to the people.

What we often see are flimsy arguments, ungrounded speculations and theories, and cheap rhetorical tricks. And yes, a lot of indiscriminate ads that often contradict the values they flaunt they are upholding and defending.

But even in very rich and sophisticated media outfits in the local and international scenes, you can also easily detect a lot of hype and hard-sell, their passion and ideological leanings often overwhelming the facts and the requirements of fairness.

In this field, they confuse complicated thinking with mature or sober reasoning. They can cite a lot of statistics and references, they can build up formidable syllogisms, but they often fall into bitter zeal, and the debate becomes more confrontational and conflictive than constructive.

Here I just wish to remit an excerpt of the official Vatican statement about this matter that gives us an idea of the rationale behind the theme. I find it worth reflecting on.

“Silence,” it says, “is not presented simply as an antidote to the constant and unstoppable flow of information that characterizes society today, but rather as a factor that is necessary for its integration.

“Silence, precisely because it favors habits of discernment and reflection, can in fact be seen primarily as a means of welcoming the word. We ought not to think in terms of a dualism, but of the complementary nature of two elements which when they are held in balance serve to enrich the value of communication and which it a key factor that can serve the new evangelization.”

That latter reference to the “new evangelization” simply refers to the fact that in the Christian paradigm, all words, all our communications, our reasoning, discussions, debates, exchanges of opinions, etc., no matter how immersed in mundane issues, should in the end serve the purpose of evangelization which is a constant concern of the Church and, in fact, of everyone in the world.

Obviously, our problem is that practically everyone in the mainstream media, let alone, our local and world leaders, is still ignorant of the vital connection between our use of words in their different forms and ways and their ultimate relation to religion.

We are still wallowing in a secularized mentality where our attitude toward the use of words is almost completely devoid of its innate religious dimension and purpose. While indeed there is autonomy of the use of words in our mundane business, such autonomy does not cut them from their religious and sacred character and purpose.

What we need is some radical change of mind and attitude. And from there, let’s hope we can develop appropriate ways of using words that respect both their autonomous mundane character and their ultimate religious and sacred purpose.

We are still far from this ideal if we have to consider how our usual leaders and those in the media use words. It’s not going to be an easy process, especially if those expected to lead the re-education of the people lack both credibility and expertise.

But I’m afraid we just have to take up this task as soon as possible, no matter how awkward it is going to be especially at the beginning. The Pope’s idea that we give silence its due attention in our communications simply has its undeniable and indispensable value.

Let’s hope that some leaders, in the Church, civil society and government, take up the challenge!

Norms of piety

2011-09-29T15:31:00.001+08:00

SINCE Christian life is a shared life with God, everything has to be done, always with the impulse of grace, to keep that nature and character of such life intact all the time. We have to be aware of this ideal and try our best to make it real daily.

We therefore need to see to it that our thinking, judging, reasoning, deciding, feeling, speaking, acting, etc., acquire a supernatural tone expected of Christian life. To a Christian faithful, life can only be either with God or without Him. There’s no such thing as an in-between, though that lifestyle is common.

Without God, our life can only be that of an animal, guided at best by varying degrees of rationality. But sooner or later, it would degenerate into one dominated merely by passions and emotions, and by purely material and temporal dimensions of our earthly life. That’s what I call the low life.

We need to develop and keep a vibrant supernatural life. That’s why we have to adapt an appropriate lifetime program that would help us to maintain a living contact with God even while immersed in our temporal affairs and mundane activities.

If we are serious about pursuing an authentic Christian life, then we can readily see the importance of coming up with an effective plan that functions 24/7.

We have to go beyond treating our Christian life as if it’s just a matter of a set of pious practices that we do from time to time, or a question of coming up with a good behavior report. In this regard, we have to pass from amateur to professional.

The basic attitude that we should keep in our mind and heart is the eagerness to look for God always and in every place, situation or circumstance. We need to look for him, so we can find him, then love and serve him. That, in effect, is what Christian life is all about.

This involves trying to live in the presence of God always, discerning what his will really is for us at any given moment, learning how to relate and offer our work and all our concerns to God, figuring out how our activity at the moment fits in God’s overall providence, etc.

We have to make this eagerness alive always, fanning it into flame, even to the point of making some extraordinary sacrifices, as when we have to do battle with our tendency to laziness, attachment to comfort, and when gripping temptations assail us.

To keep this lifestyle going, we need to make use of effective means that can give us the timely motives, the determined will to move on in spite of all obstacles. Our survival in this area is far more important than our survival in our earthly affairs.

And so we have to realize that we need certain spiritual exercises to nourish this vital contact with God. These could be some minutes of mental prayer, spiritual reading, Holy Mass and communion, Holy Rosary, confession, abiding study, acts of faith, love, contrition, examination of conscience, mortification, etc.

They can be called norms of piety, since when we commit ourselves to them, we can have some objective standards to measure our performance of our spiritual life.

Each one has to devise a plan that would fit him given his circumstances. These norms should help him rather than impede him in his spiritual life, as when one is not comfortable with them.

Obviously, there will always be sacrifice needed. Piety would not be genuine if the cross is not present there. True piety expects all forms of crosses—physical, mental, emotional, moral and spiritual.

The plan should be so designed as to effectively tackle the challenges we can face in life. The pressures and problems can arise from our own weakened self (greed, pride, lust, etc.), the harmful allurements and worries of the world, as well as the wiles of the devil.

It should incorporate some features for a continuing formation to flow with the dynamics of our Christian engagement with the world. At the moment, the world is sinking fast into secularism and relativism, as the Pope has often warned us, and we should be active in dissipating these anomalies.

So what is clear is that we just cannot be in improvising all the time in our spiritual life and in our commitment to Christianize the world. We need to be committed, properly armed and in the best fighting condition possible.

Thus, we need a serious lifetime plan with the appropriate attitude and norms of piety.

No experience of God?

2011-09-28T18:30:00.001+08:00

THAT’S what Pope Benedict, in effect, told his compatriots in a recent visit to Germany. “We see that in our affluent western world, much is lacking,” he told the Central Committee for German Catholics. “Many people lack experience of God’s goodness.”

That’s indeed a very intriguing statement from no less than the Holy Father himself, whose words just cannot be taken lightly. In his analysis of Western society, he again points as culprit the danger of relativism that cuts people from God and makes them rely only on human consensus.

It’s a mindset that’s becoming a dominant world culture and that practically rejects faith or any reference to God’s revelation to man, the role of the Church, the sacraments and spiritual life, etc. It simply depends on people’s ideas, estimations and consensus.

Relativism pits faith with reason and science. At best, it confines faith to a purely private affair. Thus, our own self-government by way of politics, culture, economics, sociology now edge out divine providence. Civility can cover for any lack of integrity and piety.

Relativism’s worst quality is that it has many good and valid points that can coincide, at least externally, with our faith, but are not inspired nor oriented toward God. That’s why it can spread rapidly in the way sweet poison works.

In short, it’s an imitation—cheap, convenient, practical, popular—that has eclipsed the original. As such, it cannot be condemned outright since it can work and produce good results, at least for a while, and even for a long while.

It cannot stand on its own feet. It’s a parasite that would always need a host to live on. Of the most vicious type, it can easily morph to suit prevailing conditions, making people almost impenetrable to the impulses of faith and grace.

But somehow its falsity cannot be hidden for long. Its inconsistency will show sooner or later, and can inflict a grave backfiring damage on the people.

In that visit to Germany, the Pope said that due to relativism many German families suffer “poverty in human relations and in the religious sphere,” in spite of the prosperity, order and efficiency seen around. There is coldness in people’s dealings, and piety is reduced to pietism.

He is calling for a return to God, extricating ourselves from the grip of relativism that can only give false hopes at best. He is asking us to return to prayer, to sacrifice, to the sacraments, to genuine ascetical struggle, to authentic Christian engagement with the world…

This is an interesting turn of events, since it shows a clash between two attitudes in life that can look similar from the outside but are actually opposed radically to one another in the inside.

It’s about time that we be clearly told about this choice. Are we for the original and real approach, or would we just be contented with the imitation? And if we opt for the original, are we willing to go through the steps needed to put it into practice?

That was practically what the Pope presented to the Germans in that visit. It’s a bold, risky move that can trigger hostile reactions, but the Pope went ahead with it. I reckon that sooner or later, that kind of choice has to be presented to the people in general. Let’s pray that things go well.

This development also highlights the fact that to experience God is not only a possibility, but rather a certainty and a necessity for us. For it happen, we of course need grace, but we also have to do our part.

Experiencing God in our life is not just a purely passive affair, totally dependent on God’s grace. It has to be actively pursued by us, and in fact it would need all that we have got.

We have to learn how to relate ourselves and all our affairs to God, seeing to it that we always set our mind and heart to God even in the midst of our mundane activities. We should avoid excluding God from our affairs and activities.

Many people are still ignorant of this need. They think that some religious practices are enough even if they do not sustain God’s presence in us all day long. This has to be corrected.

For this, we need to develop a working plan of life, consisting of some acts of piety, adapted to our different conditions, to assure us that we are having a living contact with God even as we go through all the items of our day.

The poverty challenge

2011-09-26T11:10:00.000+08:00

WE have to be ready for the poverty challenge. The world is entering a new, dangerous phase, if news items are to be to be considered. Scary possible scenarios are painted, pointing to a global economic meltdown, since the leading world economies are facing a tough future.

Again, I would not like to tackle the technical aspects of the economic crisis, since though an economist by profession, I feel that, now as priest, that's not anymore my area of competence. Besides, I have not been monitoring the economic world events that closely.

What I prefer to do is to highlight the spiritual and moral implications of this crisis that we all need to be more familiar about. After all, at the end of the day, it's in this level where things get their final verdict.

We have to be clear about poverty being not all that bad. There is something good in it, otherwise our Lord would not make it one of the beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Still, we can not and should not brush aside the ugly face of inhuman poverty that prevails in many parts of the world today.

Let's hope and pray that our bright minds and political leaders are able to find the practical solutions, at least in the short term if not in the long term, to this deadly threat of a world economic collapse.

I am optimistic that while this delicate stage in our world history can be a tipping point, solutions one way or another will always emerge. Perhaps, a new leading economy in the world will appear. For sure, realignments will take place, and yes, these will involve some painful adjustments.

Thing is we should not approach this world predicament solely from the purely human point of view—economic, social or political. That's needed, and in fact, to the hilt. But remaining in that level does not capture the entire weight of the situation. We need to go beyond.

We have to input the moral and spiritual aspects, the contribution of our faith that would bring this issue to a more comprehensive context. We have to overcome the bias against the moral and spiritual considerations that seem to grip many of our leaders in this area.

Economic thinking simply based on math, social assessments that only capture the externals of human behaviour just are not enough.

We cannot the deny that at the root of this global crisis is a virus that has gone viral for quite a time already, left to fester since it offers many sweet palliatives and other intoxicating decoys. It’s a sickness of the soul that has sold itself to the things of the world.

As consequences, we have become complacent with our duties and responsibilities that always go with our dignity as persons, children of God, citizens of a nation, etc. Work ethic has deteriorated, since work is largely seen as just a means to earn money, develop one’s potentials, acquire power and fame, etc.

Forgotten are work’s inherent quality to develop us as thinking and loving persons, united to God and to others, and meticulously mindful of the demands of the common good, the requirements of solidarity and subsidiarity that are always needed in any life shared with others.

Work has become a tool of self-assertion that creates its own divisive attitudes, language, and ultimately its own culture and lifestyle. In this system, work is detached from the designs of God and made to play the games of men, where things like greed, envy, deception, self-interest can easily dominate.

Thus, we see people spending more than they are earning, people working only for their own vested interests with hardly any consideration for the others, people expecting more privileges, and if still working, they are working for themselves, not for God, not for the others. Forms of excesses are increasing.
Our current world economic crisis is basically caused by a wrong work ethic, one that has not understood the true value of poverty that would always make us feel in need of God and others, in need of virtues, like moderation, sobriety, justice.

In fact, in this system, poverty is exclusively understood as having no money or no job, or living in bad conditions, etc. It’s a poverty blind to its original substance. It’s a poverty that is always pictured as an enemy and never as a friend.

Let’s recall what St. Paul said: “I know...both to abound, and to suffer need. I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” (Phil,4,12-13)

Ailing economies need conversion?

2011-09-23T23:47:00.001+08:00

THE question entered my mind as I read news items and several commentaries about the ailing economies of the US and Europe recently. I’m afraid these are not concerns of the Americans and the Europeans only. They have deep repercussions on the whole of humanity. They concern all of us.

This is because, in the first place, our business and economic activities are not merely mechanical functions that involve the distribution and regulation of money and other resources. They are human acts, subjects of moral requirements also. They are not purely technical operations.

As such, our business and economic activities affect our soul and not just our bodily and material needs. They involve intentions and the inner workings of a person’s soul. They entail a responsibility to infuse them with love that brings with it justice. They need to be oriented to God.

Besides, our business and economic activities are prominently social activities. What one does in this field involves others—either as suppliers, customers, clients, etc. We all get involved there, one way or another. Even the most reclusive person cannot escape from the effects of business and economics.

Our business and economic activities can go beyond provincial and country limits. The way they are conducted now, they have strong global dimensions. And when leading economies are involved, then practically the whole world economy can be affected, including ours.

In short, our business and economic activities reflect what’s inside our soul, our mind and heart, and also the character of a people’s culture and ethos. They tell a lot about ourselves and the world—whether we are with God or simply with our own selves.

That’s why when an economy gets into trouble, it can be that it is sick not only externally but also internally, not only in the technical level but also in the spiritual level that actually gives shape, direction and meaning to the technical aspect.

In the current discourse among economists trying to come up with solutions to the economic crisis in the US and Europe, I feel that the root cause is not simply a matter of the technical, but rather of the spiritual.

This can be seen in the fact that in spite of the massive stimulus and bail-out programs implemented earlier, the crisis still remains, and in fact, is spreading. A lot of money has been pumped in, but the results are still dismal.

Some economists still think that the Keynesian solution is what would do the miracle. It happened during the Great Depression. It must happen also now. Ergo, more stimulus, more quantitative easing.

It amazes me that even a Nobel Prize economist would bat for indiscriminate putting in of money, without giving due regard to where this money would come from and where and how it would be used. He still blindly believes that some invisible hand would jump-start the economy to recovery and vitality.

I don’t wish to go into the technical aspects, but my two cents already tell me that the circumstances of the Great Depression are very different from those of today’s crisis.

In the former, a lot of latent productive capabilities and opportunities needed to be tapped. Population was at its productive level. With just a little planning and reorganizing of the economic elements and players, a dam-burst of productivity took place.

In the latter, we seem to have exhausted the productive potentials. Population profile indicates a growing number of aging people expecting entitlements and support. The younger generation, while productive, is often immersed in the idle business of pure commercialism, if not of hedonism. It’s a deceptive productivity that is produced.

In general, people are spending more than what they are earning, and are pursuing business ventures that are not really needed and are sometimes even detrimental to human dignity. Just think of the entertainment business, for example.

I feel that what is happening in the economic front these days in the so-called developed countries is a corrective moment in this long process of doing business and economics mired with defective inputs.

It’s like saying, we have been wrong in the way we do business. Some things might be right, and for a long time we managed to hide the wrong things. But the time has arrived for the accumulated effects of the wrong things to take center stage.

The main message seems to be, we need to rectify, to be converted from our evil ways. We need drastic lifestyle change. We need to do business and economics for God’s glory and not just for human convenience.

Church-world engagement

2011-09-20T15:29:00.000+08:00

I WAS happy to learn that in a recent gathering of some bishops, priests and lay leaders in Cebu, the concern was raised to look into issues involving workers. There was talk about raising the minimum wage and also about the duty for the Church to get involved in these matters. She cannot remain indifferent to these, a news item said.

These, I think, are good developments. They highlight the often ignored responsibility that the Church should be very much concerned about socio-economic and even political issues that have impact on the dignity of persons.

This is simply because whatever concerns man is a concern of Christ, and therefore of the Church. And so we have to make some revision of attitudes and thinking that before appear to be restrictive, isolationist, veering more to the spiritual at the expense of the material, to the clerical at the expense of the laical.

That is to say, things have to be done properly. These developments should avoid a free-for-all scramble, confusing the roles of clergy and laity. We should try to avoid what is called as clericalism and spiritualism, on the one hand, and laicism and secularism, on the other.

We need to deepen our knowledge of the nature and purpose of the Church, as well as the roles of the different members—the clergy, the laity and the religious—that comprise it.

For any collective action to be dynamic, living and meaningful, we should not forget the principles of common good, solidarity and subsidiarity. The many practical implications of these principles ought to be known and lived by all, and most especially, by the Church leaders who need to be trained for this purpose.

We need to look at Christ for the proper way to do this Church-world engagement. Of course, we should neither ignore the Church tradition that has been developed through history that, in spite of some limitations, offers a good light to guide us in this regard.

While it is a divine institution, the Church is also human, subject to space and time, and to all other human factors—social, historical, cultural, political, etc. While it is in possession of the supernatural, it is subject to the natural process of development.

The Church leaders who are supposed to orchestrate Church-world engagement should have a good understanding of how to do things in this regard. For example, the concern for macro issues in the world, like the working conditions of laborers, environment, mining, corruption, gambling, etc., should never set aside what may be called as the micro requirements of prayer, sacrifice, sacraments, etc.

The organic link between these two aspects of Christian life should be lived and clearly expressed in all the pertinent public pronouncements and actuations. We should avoid giving the impression, no matter how slight, of interventions by Church leaders in temporal affairs as being purely social or economic or political in nature.

That would violate the nature and mission of the Church. The Church is only interested in the eternal salvation of man, and any temporal affair or worldly issue to which the Church is drawn to intervene, should be clearly related to this ultimate eternal-salvation-of-man mission.

Otherwise, the Church leaders should just allow its lay faithful to sort out what is best for everyone, or at least for the majority, in matters that are open to many legitimate opinions and to human consensus.

Church leaders should refrain from downgrading their roles into political leaders , economic pundits or social workers. Christ rejected all temptations to make him an earthly king with an earthly kingdom.

Still, we have to understand that the Church is involved even in matters of opinion, because the laity are very much into them. Their autonomy, arising from the autonomy of worldly affairs with respect to man’s eternal salvation, should be respected.

We have to avoid clericalism in the Church as much as we reject secularism in the world. Yes, it’s true that there should be Church-world engagement, but we need to follow the rules of engagement, set by Christ and now taught by the Church.

The Church too can benefit from the continuing consensus of human opinions by fine-tuning her social doctrine to capture and express the finer nuances of the human condition in relation to our eternal salvation. This will be an ongoing, endless task that should be pursued with openness and prudence.

The world should also recognize that the Church has a place in the public discourse of world issues, and acknowledge the benefit it can derive from such Church participation.

Apologetics for intellectuals

2011-09-18T21:03:00.000+08:00

THE first time I heard the word, apologetics, I thought it had to do with saying sorry over something. Thus, I was surprised when I learned ages ago that it actually means “the branch of theology that is concerned with defending or proving the truth of Christian doctrines.”

I imagine it's a theology that needs to be given all the time. Nowadays, it is even urgent. Christian faith, in a way, is under heavy and constant attack by intellectuals whose attitude toward the faith seems to be restricted in the confines of reason, intuition and gut feel alone. The impulses of the spiritual and supernatural are systematically rejected.

Of course, I am happy that basic catechesis continues to be given in many places. In Bohol right now, for example, a new catechism that attempts to bring the loftiness of Christian doctrine to the local culture has just been produced. This, to me, is a moving development.

But with the Internet, I get to have a good idea of the range of views and opinions in this regard, and, oh, how vast, complicated, exciting and challenging they can be! They are in the blogs where the comments can be lurid. Or in newspapers, like the New York Times, where the language can be educated, the arguments well-studied and persuasive.

Thus, if one is not strong in the faith, or would not know how to defend what he believes, then he can easily get lost and can fall into many possible scenarios—like losing his faith or falling into skepticism, relativism, agnosticism, atheism, cynicism, etc.

At best, he can just get satisfied with the sensation of cruising through life, opening himself to anything, and simply depending on human consensus arrived at from purely human and natural sources—biological, emotional, economic, social, political, etc.

This seems to be the current mindset, with many people saying it's the best since it is the most “democratic.” It does not brand people according to some creed or ideology that, they say, often lead people to extreme, ridiculous positions. It fosters “openness” and a “sportive” outlook in life.

Sorry that I have to put those terms in quotes, since I have serious misgivings about describing that mindset that way. In fact, I believe, it is a mentality that is undemocratic, closed and unsportive. But this will take a long explanation that cannot fit in this article. We can tackle it some other time.

We have to unleash the full force of apologetics that would basically use reason to prove the reasonability of faith in our life. That's how I understand apologetics. Our intellectuals are so attached to reason that any reference to faith is met with immediate scorn. We have to disabuse them from that trap, doing it with utmost delicacy, respect and gentleness.

The reasonability of faith can be proven in many, in fact, endless, ways. In the first place, because reason in itself is always in search for a firm foundation and a sure goal. By itself, it is incomplete, always under tension, restless, reminding us of what St. Augustine once said: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you, Lord.”

By itself, reason can just spin and spin, and without any clear foundation and purpose, it can spin out of control, then fall into an anomalous, irregular condition similar to a sickness. It can even enter into a state of invincible error where its pitiable state is considered correct, healthy, most human, etc.

Of course, we have to understand that apologetics should not just be an intellectual exercise. It has to be done and developed in the context always of prayer, sacrifice, interior struggle, recourse to the sacraments, etc.

The success of apologetics, for sure, will not just be a matter of intellectual enlightenment. It will require a conversion of heart for both the giver and receiver. And so, we just have to be generous in developing our spiritual life.

How could we ever convince a deep skeptic if we just use reason alone? Here, I'd like to remit a comment of a usual reactor to my views, to give us an idea of how complicated a skeptic's mind works.

“One million planets the size of earth could fit inside the sun. The sun itself is no big giant. There are existing stars bigger than our sun.

“To think that on this speck of dust called earth, God created man in his own image and likeness...Could anything be more terrestrially ludicrous, if not celestially ridiculous?”

From misery to mystery

2011-09-13T23:47:00.001+08:00

IF we only have a linear way of thinking, these conditions of misery and mystery can be the two opposite extremes of the range of possibilities we can have in our life here on earth. Misery can be the lowest status we can have, and mystery, while unsettling, can be the acme of human experience.

Of course, we try to live a more normal life, endeavoring to stay away from these two extremes. We can think the ideal is that.

But we know that our life is not simply linear and flat, or just two or three-dimensional. It is complex and multi-dimensional, giving these two conditions the chance of coinciding, insteading of conflicting. This happens especially when we bring in matters of faith, of the spiritual and supernatural into the equation.

In the Christian faith, these two extremes can converge in the phenomenon of the Holy Cross that signifies both the worst of human misery and the best of mystical life. It is both defeat and victory, darkness and light, death and life everlasting.

We need to highlight this truth of faith these days, since it is often forgotten and ignored, if not ridiculed and rejected. And if it happens that some acceptance is made, it usually comes with a lot of distortion and misunderstanding.

The modern mind, often priding itself as well-informed, interdisciplinary, sophisticated, etc., actually fails many times to appreciate this truth. And that´s because in spite of the information overdrive and data glut, faith is not well understood, much less, lived.

We need to bring this good news to the mainstream of society, because the truth of the Holy Cross is not meant only for a few, for those who happen to be religious in temperament. This truth is for all. It´s supposed to have a universal audience.

Obviously, it is a truth that needs not only to be taught and preached. It has to be prayed for, with sacrifices put in, since it can only enter people´s minds and hearts when grace touches them and leads them to be humble enough to believe.

Pride kills faith and blinds us to the richness of deep supernatural truths and mysteries. It tends to intoxicate us with reason alone, if not with feelings only, often keeping us only the realm of what is pragmatic, popular, convenient.

We need to actively look for the Cross, find it everyday, love and embrace it, because first of all that is what Christ told us: ¨If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me.¨ (Mt 16,24)

Besides, the cross is something we cannot avoid. It is the consequence of our sins and mistakes. But Christ converted it into an instrument of our salvation. With him on the cross, the sting of sin and death is removed.

A beautiful prayer expresses this truth well: ¨You decreed that man should be saved through the wood of the cross. The tree of man´s defeat became his tree of victory; where life was lost, there life has been restored through Christ our Lord...¨ (Preface, Triumph of the Cross)

We have to understand that we can only progress in our spiritual life, individually and collectively, through the Cross. We can only do effective battle to the enemies of our soul—our laziness, pride, vanity, greed, lust, etc.--through the cross.

It´s this Cross of Christ that has brought about the Church, the doctrine of our faith, the sacraments, the holy lives of saints whose testimonies can move and melt the hardest of hearts.

This Cross transcends the best of human reasoning and experiences. This was the testimony, for example, of that great intellectual saint, Edith Stein, who facing a great trial once said:

¨This was my first encounter with the Cross, and with the divine virtue which it infuses in those who carry it. Thus I saw for the first time and palpably before me, in its victory over the sting of death, the Church born out of the passion of the Redeemer. It was the moment when my disbelief collapsed and Christ radiated, Christ in the mystery of the Cross.¨

May we learn to look for the Cross always, embracing it tightly, convinced that´s where our true joy and liberation are found. May we learn to find the Cross in our daily affairs, big and small. May we deeply realize that our life is always a blend of joy and sacrifice, smile and suffering, optimism and difficulty, filial abandon in the hands of God and determined struggle.

Opinion-making

2011-09-12T17:41:00.000+08:00

EVERYONE has an opinion about almost anything, and it’s good that we foster this attitude and habit, for it can mean one is trying to contribute something to society. Obviously, everyone has to realize that opinion-making has its standards and requirements that should be met as strictly as possible.

At the very least, opinions give everybody else an idea of how one thinks and feels with respect to an issue. They give us a picture of the situations and predicaments of people, since these get reflected in their views. In the end, they can give us a good reading of a society’s pulse and culture.

For this reason, we should encourage everyone to express their opinions and teaching them how to do it. With our new technologies, this concern should not be hard to attend to.

We should make the mentality of not making any opinion or keeping our views to ourselves a thing of the past. We need to be more participative of our society’s developments. Government and other institutions, like the media, should build up the appropriate structures and mechanisms to foster opinion-making.

For sure, there are instances when we need to be silent for a while. Prudence and discretion require that. But in normal circumstances, we should be quite free to say what we think and feel toward a particular issue. Our life, both personal and social, is so dynamic we just cannot keep its developments in total silence.

We just have to make sure that the views and opinions are expressed with due sense of responsibility. They should be meant to uphold the common good and not just to reinforce one’s individuality or showcase one’s talents and other advantages through wealth and power, an exercise of lording it over others.

Precisely because of that, these views and opinions should be preceded with due study and reflection, considering the different aspects involved and anticipating also the positions and points of view of others. Our views can never be one-way streets, unilateral in character or isolated in a vacuum.

In fact, we should welcome reactions and responses from others, no matter how different and even in conflict they may be with ours, as long as these too are done with due study and reflection, and with sincere intention to contribute to the common good.

Thus, we need to understand that opinion-making has to be firmly anchored on God, the source of all good things. We need to know and follow his commandments, his will, designs and ways, since it’s in these where we can ultimately find the elements of the genuine common good for us.

We just cannot follow our own ideas, without relating these ideas to God. No matter how brilliant they may look and sound to us, if they are not based on God’s will, they are bound to give trouble to us sooner or later.

Views and opinions not inspired by God’s love would most likely be contaminated with envy, hatred, greed, pride, vanity, and these have no other effect than discord and division. As St. James said, “For where envying and contention is, there is inconstancy and every evil work.” (3,16)

It's when opinion-making is infused with a religious sense, with a clear reference to God's designs, no matter how mysterious these may be, that we can have a better chance of serving the cause of objectivity and fairness better.

Our views would be respectful of the those of others. We can practice restraint , moderation and courtesy, and avoid falling into the pit of bitter zeal. We can develop broadmindedness and shun rash judgments and undue biases. And when we commit mistakes, it would be much easier to rectify.

The autonomy we enjoy in exercising our freedom of expression should never be understood as putting God aside in forming our views and opinions. If anything at all, that autonomy should make us feel more urged to go to God, to pray and ask for enlightenment, so that even in the midst of many legitimate and even conflicting opinions, we can still manage to serve the common good while respecting everybody.

That is why, professional opinion-makers, who express their views in public, should consider the importance of prayer and contemplation when they do their job. They have to realize that they are accountable before God and men for every word they make.

Theirs is a very delicate job. They should avoid knee-jerk reactions and reckless shooting from the hip. They also have to clear up the air when it gets dirtied due to unavoidable conflicts.

Mental illness and spirituality

2011-09-07T19:03:00.000+08:00

I WAS happy to learn that a lady celebrity openly threw her support for those suffering mental illness in varying degrees by putting up a foundation. She lost a daughter who, in spite of her high academic and social status and accomplishments, committed a depression-induced suicide.

I hope her example could trigger more support from many other able families with similar experiences, so that this menace can be tackled more effectively.

Cases of mental illness are increasing everywhere. I now know of many of them, and they need not be people far from us. They can be within the family, the clan, neighborhood, the school…

When I was a kid, there was a joke that went around and that made me laugh out loud. The church, it said, would not be complete without a stray dog and a fool present in its activities. And I saw it verified many times in my own experiences.

But now, I don’t laugh at it anymore. It is not a joke. It has become a real, big problem.

The other day, I read in the Internet that nearly 40% of Europeans—about 165 million people—are reported sick of some mental disorder these past years. “Mental disorders have become Europe’s largest health challenge of the 21st century,” said the authors of the study.

Some disorders mentioned in the study are depression, anxiety, insomnia, dementia that lead to a heavy economic and social burden, since the sufferers would be unable to work and relationships are often harmed and broken.

We all need to get our act together to face this very challenging problem. And while the medical field has a lot to do with this, we have to understand that this problem requires a lot of family and community support, and above all, it needs tremendous spiritual help.

Mental illness may have an organic dimension, but it too has a spiritual component. I was happy to learn lately that many doctors are developing what they call as integrative medicine that incorporates some human and spiritual inputs into their work of healing. This should be developed more.

Insofar as the spiritual dimension is concerned, I would say that as a preventive means, we need to clean up our environment of immoral pollution and foster a healthy spiritual and moral life in everyone.

We are having lifestyles that may look happy and prosperous, but are actually empty inside, and therefore vulnerable to psychological diseases. It’s undeniable that we have a big scourge of pretension and hypocrisy afflicting large sectors of society.

I believe that as long as people know how to pray, to value sacrifice, to develop virtues like humility, simplicity, and to work hard, they would be more able to tackle whatever problems and pressures may come that could lead to mental illness.

And when the illness comes, I believe that it is best handled when people go to Christ, just like what those who were sick with all kinds of diseases and even those possessed by evil spirits did.

These disorders require medicine, but they also need going back to God who is the ultimate healer. This is something we should never forget. Otherwise, we can easily fall into the spiral of despair. God offers us hope always, hope that does not defraud us.

And then people should be taught how to suffer, making everyone realize that any pain and suffering we have need not be a completely negative experience. Our suffering in any form can acquire great redeeming value, if lived with Christ, uniting ours with his.

The families and community in general should know how to make adjustments—even to make big sacrifices and drastic changes of lifestyle—to accommodate the needs of those who are sick with mental illness.

Truth is the patients simply need our time, our comforting and reassuring words. They need to be taught how to pray. Just like in the gospel where people brought their relatives and friends who were sick to Jesus, we need to bring our patients to Christ also.

And this can require tremendous effort as shown in the case of the paralytic who was brought to Jesus by his friends. Since the place was already crowded, they had to climb to the roof, bore a hole and lowered the paralytic right in front of Jesus. With such faith, our Lord could not but cure the paralytic.

We can say that this mental illness crisis in the world is an invitation for us to seek Christ. It wants us to develop the appropriate spirituality.

Quest for ethics

2011-09-06T20:51:00.000+08:00

IT is said that today’s young generation is grammatically challenged. I suppose that has something to do with our texting culture that hardly gives attention to spelling, subject-verb agreement, etc.

This lax attitude is even affecting the schools where teachers also teach in a telegraphic way instead of in complete and correct sentences. This is also shown in our newspapers where the English language is murdered ad nauseam.

The phenomenon actually baffles me, because given our new technologies, it should not be difficult to learn the language well.

I remember when I was in grade school and high school, textbooks were hard to find. To know the meaning of a word, for example, I had to make a long trip to the public library just to get hold of a dictionary which had many torn and missing pages. Now, you just have to click a button, and libraries of the world come in display.

I think it is not so much a problem of grammar as it is a deeper problem of a dysfunctional study and work ethic. Many young people are not studying as they should. They are lost in a confused sense of priorities.

I think people nowadays are more ethically challenged than grammatically challenged. And I’m afraid that condition is reinforced systematically in our society today.

Here we have to be most careful in pointing out the problem areas, since all of us are involved, one way or another. Whether one works in sacred or mundane environments, this ethics problem would be always around in varying forms and degrees.

But we need to point some problem areas, especially those with public character, since they leave behind a big bad effect on many people.

At the moment, we cannot deny the fact that with our current state and pace of development, we are confronted with many new situations whose moral and ethical standing we are not clear about.

The world of politics is, of course, a given. It is like a free-for-all arena where the players can always come up with innovative ideas and moves that often strain the moral requirements. We just have to be patient with it, handling it with as calmly as we can.

The world of economics and the markets is now getting more dynamic and more confusing. Competition is getting stiffer and is producing new, puzzling and complicated issues. Here also, the concern for their ethical assessment should try to cope with the rapid pace.

But the sector with more immediate impact on the people would be the media. This, I think, is where the quest for ethics should be most intense and most prompt. But I wonder if this concern is given due attention.

What I can see is the attitude that since they are just bearers of news, they are excused from worrying too much about the ethical aspect of their work. But I don’t think that line still holds.

Everyone knows that the media exert tremendous influence, both open and hidden, on how people think and react to issues and problems. What they choose to report, how they report it, what slant or spin they take, obviously affect the way people think.

What I often see in the local papers, especially in the sections of the editorial and opinion page, feedback, cartoons, entertainment, to cite a few, are samples of very biased, ill-thought-out views, and all sorts of ad hominems done with impunity.

We will always have differences and even conflicts of opinions, but it’s another story when things are done with blatant lack of charity, tact and delicacy in the presentation and exchanges of ideas.

We just cannot say, for example, that just because a public official is accused of a crime as claimed by an opponent or based on a leaked document, we now have the right to put that news in the paper, making it even as the headline.

A lot of examining ought to be done, a lot of restraint has to be made. These ought to be done first, rather than putting people in a bad light, no matter how guilty these people may be.

And when those accused would be found later to be innocent or that the charges did not have basis, apologies and clarifications are seldom made.

Thus, the environment gets increasingly fouled up. We should pursue the quest for ethics more seriously. And we have to understand that this is a matter of questing for holiness, for God. Without this, we would be on a freefall to unethical practices.

Primacy of conscience?

2011-09-05T18:55:00.000+08:00

CONSCIENCE continues to be a hot issue among theologians and those who try to describe how our moral life should be. In the blogosphere, there is now a lot of discussion, often raising dust and emitting sparks that tend to darken and confuse people rather than enlighten and clarify.

There is even now a group of theologians who, reacting to recent scandals and other problems of the Church today, boldly propose ecclesiastical structural reforms that more or less are inspired by this so-called primacy of conscience.

Fine, but let's look at things more closely. Offhand, at first reading, I already get the impression that what they are proposing does not amount to a further homogeneous development of our understanding of Church, faithful to the original, but rather a mutation, a heterogeous departure from the original, a different banana, so to speak.

Appeals to understanding, compassion and charity are made to sweeten the acceptability of these proposals. For sure, we all have to be understanding, compassionate and charitable, but all these should not depart from the truth, from faith, from Church teaching, and from Christ himself.

Our quest for Church development and Christian maturity should not abandon our duty to fidelity. To flow with the times, to adapt to the current situations should never be understood as having the right to transfer our anchor to another set of beliefs.

We have to be wary when we react to problems and issues simply relying on gut feel or instincts or the Pavlovian way that take in only the here and now and ignoring the eternal, the short-run and forgetting the long-run, the literal while setting aside the other deeper aspects and higher angles from which they should be viewed.

Sad to say, some of our local thinkers invoke this so-called primacy of conscience to support the view that people should be left on their own to decide what is good for them in terms of reproductive rights and health. They should not be told they are wrong when they opt to go into a contraceptive lifestyle. To them, that would not be respecting their conscience.

It's obvious that our conscience plays an indispensable part in our lives. We always have to follow it, because right or wrong, it is the judgment we make whether the action we are going to do, are doing or have already done, is good or bad.

From there, we can readily see that our conscience does not operate in a vacuum. It is neither absolutely self-generated nor self-contained. It has to be conformed to a law which it does not invent, but rather only discovers. And it has the duty to uphold that law, know and live it better each day, protect and defend it, etc.

The primacy of conscience or the freedom of conscience should not be understood as the right for one to be absolutely left on his own when he decides, without giving him support, advice, clarification, and even correction from God through human instruments.

No one is free from God who is our Creator, and who establishes the original divine law that governs all of us. From this law springs the moral law that governs our human acts. No one is free from the human instruments and institutions God has made available to guide us.

Even in our political and social life, we immediately acknowledge the need for offices and officials with power and authority to help us live out our life as a nation. In our spiritual and moral life, the same thing happens. We need offices, officials, institutions, etc. with power and authority to guide us. We just cannot fence our conscience from them.

In one blog, I read a twisted interpretation of how the Catechism itself describes conscience. That it is “man's most secret core and his sanctuary (where) he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths (1776),” is now taken to mean that no one can tell anything to anyone about what his conscience tells him, because conscience is supposedly an affair strictly between God and man.

Even the Catechism point on the need for the formation of conscience is understood as one undertaken strictly by oneself and his view of God. No one can teach him anything. So now, all consciences are correct. There can be no erroneous consciences!

This phenomenon reminds me of the scribes and Pharisees of Christ's time. They were also intelligent and religious, but preferred to have their own views instead of acknowledging Christ as Redeemer.

Linking time and eternity

2011-09-03T18:57:00.000+08:00

WE have to be aware of this dual dimension of our life. In fact, I believe this aspect refers to the ultimate status of our life. We should not be too immersed in the here and now to forget that time is meant for eternity, and we have a role to play in their connection.

We live both in time and eternity for now, and later, in a definitive state, in eternity with God or separated from him forever, since time would be completely taken up by eternity the moment time runs its course through our death or through the world’s end.

But at any instant, our earthly life also is in eternity. The flow of time is always within the sea of eternity, since eternity is both outside and inside time. Whatever we do now, no matter how transient, always leaves an effect in eternity.

This is because being both material and spiritual, with body and soul as constituent elements of our nature, we can’t help but live in both time and eternity. Time is when we are tested as to our correspondence, or lack of it, to God's love. As St. Augustine said, “God created you without you, but he cannot save you without you.”

We need to understand that what we do in time, how we live our life here on earth determines the state of life we are going to have in our eternal life. Our earthly and temporal affairs, no matter how immersed in the material and the mundane, have an impact on our spiritual and eternal dimension. Time is the gateway to eternity.

We have to sharpen our senses and faculties so that this reality of how our time is related to eternity is not lost in us. The linking takes place mainly in our mind and heart where we can converge our material and spiritual dimensions, where the interaction between God and us, eternity and time takes place.

This means that we have to sharpen our spiritual faculties, nourishing them with eternal truths and not only with earthly facts and temporal data. This means that we have to spiritualize and raise to the supernatural level with the reception of grace our bodily faculties, such as our senses, emotions, passions, imagination, etc.

We have to avoid allowing our spiritual faculties to be completely at the mercy of our senses and the goings-on of the material world. We have to break loose from the mentality, quite strong and prevalent, of considering our life as mainly if not totally just time-and-earth-bound.

With God's grace and our efforts, we have to direct our earthly and temporal life here to eternity, to God. We should not allow our life to drift just anywhere, or to be totally dominated by earthly and temporal aims.

We don’t deal only with food and drinks, with material and purely human needs and natural goals. We have to deal with spiritual and eternal requirements and objectives as well. As our Lord said, “Not by bread alone does man live but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4,4)

We need to see to it that our thoughts and desires are immersed in the supernatural gifts of faith, hope and charity, those theological virtues that enable our earthly and temporal affairs to acquire spiritual, supernatural and eternal value.

That is why, we need to study and assimilate the doctrine of our faith, make it generate hope in our earthly pilgrimage, and fuel the love that catapults us to eternity, uniting us to God and others.

All the other human virtues and qualities should be imbued with these supernatural gifts. We have to be wary of our tendency to develop many good qualities inspired only by human and natural ideals.

As Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva once said: “If you lose the supernatural meaning of your life, your charity will be philanthropy, your purity decency, your mortification stupidity...” (The Way, 280)

A basic attitude to develop is the determination to look for God everyday and in everything. We just cannot be passive in this, waiting for things to tickle our interests and curiosities.

We have to look for him, find him, love him and serve him, using both material and spiritual means, natural and supernatural virtues. And knowing that loving God is in loving others, then we should be actively immersed in all the affairs of men in this world, but out of love of God, and not just out of some natural motive.

Handling the word

2011-09-01T18:06:00.001+08:00

WE have to learn how to handle words. It's a most delicate task. We are given an idea of its brittleness in these words of St. James about our tongue: “The tongue is indeed a little member, and boasts great things. Behold how small a fire kindles a great wood. And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity...” (3,5-6) So, we need to be most careful when using them.

For sure, words are not just a group of letters. They have a meaning, they transmit concepts, judgments and reasoning. They are dead unless picked up by us and enlivened by our will, desires and purposes. That's when they can be good or bad, useful or useless, constructive or destructive, meaningful or empty, moral or immoral, etc.

They depend on how we use them, on what intention we have. They can have either the divisive Tower-of-Babel consequence or the unitive Pentecost effect. Words are a vital part of our dynamic life. They both reflect and build up the kind of life we have. Thus, they are a powerful part of our life.

We just have to realize more deeply and more abidingly that our words need to be properly grounded and oriented, since in the end, words have their proper origin and purpose. They just did not spring spontaneously and on their own. Neither are they purely of our own making.

And this origin and purpose can only be God, whose Word is responsible for the creation and governance of the whole universe. “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord God.” (Rev 1,8)

This is something that might still jolt us, since the common understanding is that words are just our pure invention. Not so! We have to correct that erroneous mindset, which might take quite an effort not only in the personal level, but more so in social and cultural level.

Realizing this fundamental character of words, we then should realize that we need to relate our words with God. We just cannot be plain users of theirs without connecting them to God.

This is when we can truly internalize and assimilate them to our soul, making them an organic part of our identity. This is when we would really know who we are, that we are first of all creatures of God, who have been made children of his, and expected to participate in the very life and action of God.

God's Word is therefore the origin and end of our words. It's a powerful word that can give tremendous and radical changes. In the gospel there's a reference to this fact when the people got amazed with Christ's words. “What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.” (Lk 4,36)

Of course, in the Letter to the Hebrews, we are given a more intimate view of the character of God's word: “The word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (4,12)

These words should make us realize that God's word is what really would guide us in the way of we use words. Meditating on God's word is therefore a must. Relating it to our communications and our affairs, and vice-versa, is also a must. We have to quit the practice of using words without relating them to God's word.

That attitude and habit may lead us to some dark areas, since God's word is full of mysteries. But at least such attitude and habit would make us humble, cautious, prudent, tactful, courteous and always charitable. We would avoid being reckless.

When we use words with charity, then our communications would have those qualities described by St. Paul: patient, kind, envy not, deal not perversely, not puffed up, not ambitious, seek not their own, not provoked to anger, think no evil, rejoice not in iniquity but in the truth, bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. (cfr 1 Cor 13,4-7)

Let's remember always that our words should not just be a tool of our reason and feelings alone. That would lead us to situations prone to a lot of dangers—conflicts, anger, hatred, etc. They have to spring from our faith and charity, where our words would have their most proper context.

Morality and the economy

2011-08-30T18:05:00.000+08:00

THE Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church dedicates a big section to this topic of morality and the economy precisely because it in itself is important and essential in our life, and also because it is often forgotten or taken for granted, if not wantonly violated.

In one point of the Compendium, it is said that “the relation between morality and economics is necessary, indeed intrinsic: economic activity and moral behavior are intimately joined one to the other.” (331)

We have to remember that economics is not only a science but also a human activity, involving not only individuals but also whole societies. It cannot help but assume moral requirements that we have to pursue and fulfill, develop, protect and defend.

Economics should not be done in a purely materialistic way, expressed in terms of money alone, or profit. That would be an inhuman economics that would sooner or later convert us into objects or targets, and not anymore as persons, and much less as children of God.

We have to be wary of the subtle pressures—social and political—that lead us to forget about morality in economics. Some political leaders, for example, in their effort to gain political advantage, can just pursue economic plans that produce quick political favors but sacrifice some moral and spiritual requirements.

We can refer to the phenomena of workaholism and professionalitis that afflict many people and that erode family life as well as spiritual life of personal prayer and the fulfillment of religious obligations.

We also have the culture of indiscriminate dole-outs and bail-outs, and other forms of questionable entitlements and privileges that spoil people, making them overly dependent on others and the government.

There are other forms of inequalities and injustice: hiring of minors, pressuring women to work at the expense of caring for the family, unhealthy working conditions like young people asked to work overtime and at grave-yard shifts for long periods of time, children used in cybersex, etc.

The bad effects are unmistakable and are growing—physical, mental and spiritual deterioration, alcoholism, marital infidelities, family break-ups, cultural impoverishment, growing materialism, greed and envy.

We cannot anymore treat these problems independently of the organic relationship between morality and economics. We have to realize that they stem from a bigger problem that needs to be resolved adequately and quickly.

The Compendium further clarifies that “the necessary distinction between morality and the economy does not entail the separation of these two spheres but, on the contrary, an important reciprocity.”

This doctrine is very relevant these days since there is a big tendency for us not only to separate the two but also to put them in conflict. Very often we are forced to make a choice between the two. We are made to believe they cannot be together.

Everyone of us, in the different levels and aspects of life, from the individual to all degrees of collectivity that we get involved in, should realize that we need to be well grounded in the correct delineation of the link between morality and spirituality, on the one hand, and the economy, on the other hand.

We cannot remain naïve in this regard. We cannot anymore afford to stay primitive in this concern. Those involved more in the promotion of morality—priests and teachers—should be mindful of the objective needs of economics and should foster rather than obstruct their fulfillment.

So they should try their best also to know more and more about economics—its laws and different doctrines—so they could attune their teaching and counsels to concrete conditions of the people, and not remain only in theories that hardly have any impact on real situations.

We are now into an interdisciplinary way of life. We should continue our education and formation, updating ourselves with the endless flow of developments that are now also monitored more closely by our new technologies.

Those working more directly in the economy—employees and employers, businessmen, investors, etc.—should also be mindful of the requirements of morality. They just cannot remain in the level of practicality and profitability. They have to know the deeper needs of men and learn to adapt their economic plans to such needs.

The crises we are witnessing in the world at present are caused to a great extent by our not integrating morality and spirituality with our economics, business and politics. This is the challenge we are facing these days.

Let’s hope the bigger entities—churches, government, schools, families--can help in tackling this challenge, developing programs for this particular concern.

Sports and spirituality

2011-08-26T18:08:00.001+08:00

BOYS will always be boys. Given any chance to play sports, their reaction is always lightning quick and wholehearted. In fact, I sometimes get the impression that’s where their heart really is. Classes are a poor second, or a third or fourth…

We just opened our yearly intramural Olympiad in school, and the school environment suddenly changed mood. More movement, more laughter, more color. The boys seem to be on auto-pilot, guided by instincts otherwise hidden during normal schooldays.

Through it all, I somehow detected unmistakable traces and signs of growth and development. There was more self-confidence, better teamwork, an increased daring to show their talents and gifts, or as they say, to strut their stuff.

It’s true that while their education requires some controlled environment, they need to be unleashed from time to time, asking them to do things on their own.

That’s where we can see whether degrees of maturity and sense of responsibility have been gained or not. That’s where we can see who are the leaders and who the followers. That’s where we can see their strengths and weakness.

I saw their cheer dance competition and their artwork exhibit—I could not be in all events—but I was already floored to see their creativity and artistry that truly widened my perspectives. It’s indeed a blessing that can come only from God.

It’s always moving to see them try their best to be more human and Christian, to become more mature and responsible in spite of the many demons they have to face. Human weakness and miseries, temptations from within and without hound them as they do everybody else. But their struggles have a peculiar quality.

They’re still awkward and prone to try flying without knowing exactly where they would land. They’re still into a grueling process of self-discovery, a very crucial stage where they need the most help that should not be too intrusive, which they resent.

It’s in sports where a common language is instantly spoken and understood even between staff and students, and practically by all. Barriers seen in classrooms and workshops seem to get dismantled in the gym. And everyone enjoys and looks forward to it.

That’s why sports has to be given its proper place in school life. It may not be the most important element, but I would say it’s an indispensable auxiliary component. For it can also be a terrific school of many virtues.

But it has to be infused also with the proper spirit. Otherwise, it can degenerate into a network of vices and inhuman attitudes—greed, lust, vanity, frivolity, etc.—that can become formidable since with sports this network gets extremely enjoyable and addictive.

Everyone needs to be reminded that sports has to serve our true dignity as persons and children of God. It cannot be an excuse for us to indulge in animality and savagery. Competition need not be an exercise of pride, envy and hatred.

It can be a healthy occasion to build a realistic attitude to life, for which one realizes the need for discipline and preparation, hardwork and focus. It can be a good learning moment for the interplay of the basic social principles of the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity.

Competition tells us we are not alone, we need to be with others. It tells us we have to work for a goal, each one contributing whatever he can and always doing it in an effective tandem with others.

Competition is a driver of development at least in the personal and social aspects of one’s life. It pushes one to go to the limits of his capabilities not only in the technical aspects but especially in the more human ones—magnanimity, gracefulness, patience, optimism, etc.

That’s why it is important to make everyone understand the true nature and purpose of competition. If one knows what competition really is and is for, he will always come out a victor whether he wins or loses in a game or business.

Defeat, according to General George Patton, is not due to losses but to the destruction of the soul. It’s when one surrenders to discouragement, pessimism, despair.

That’s why it is important that everyone learns to compete properly, correcting him whenever the spoilers of the true status of competition come. How essential is it, therefore, that the young ones be immediately reminded and encouraged whenever they show signs of misunderstanding it.

Of course, the very fundamental principle of sports and competition is one’s love for God. Outside of that, forget it.

Where fairness springs

2011-08-25T21:43:00.001+08:00

TWO pieces of news caught my attention recently. Both came from the US. One says that the New York mayor decided to “ban religion” at the forthcoming 9/11 ceremony. The other, that the American communication regulating body finally scrapped the so-called “Fairness doctrine.”

Both are good materials to reflect once again on where we can find fairness in the media as in anywhere else. We should approach the issue with calmness, making deliberate effort to stay clear from the journalistic hypes and stretches that often twist and disfigure things and lead us to make unfair judgments and opinions.

In fairness to the New York mayor, I don’t think he is against religion per se. He just wanted, according to him, to give focus on the families of the victims of this tremendous tragedy. That’s why he would not invite not only religious leaders but also politicians.

He has a point, of course, although I would not agree with it completely. Religion and politics, whether we like it or not, simply have a role to play in such momentous event of remembering a heart-rending national disaster that has affected America and the world not only politically but also spiritually.

But I would not insist so much on my view. If the mayor thinks otherwise, so be it. I would not like to go deeper, at least for now, to see if there’s some hidden agenda, ulterior motive or bigger picture attached to this decision. But I would like that he reconsiders the religious part of the ceremony.

The other news about the discarding of the Fairness Doctrine amused me somehow. The people involved finally surrendered to the challenge of putting that doctrine into practice.

An official aptly said the doctrine was already a dead letter that should remain dead. Resurrecting it would just be an unnecessary distraction. In his rhetorical flourish, he offered to give it its last rites.

This is an interesting development, since fairness in media or in politics as in anywhere else is always a concern to be taken care of. While the decisions of the American officials regarding the specific cases mentioned above could be warranted, I believe everyone agrees that fairness never becomes obsolete.

Fairness should continue to be pursued and observed. But how can this be done? Especially in our Philippine setting, this concern is hardly given any serious thought.

I have read and studied a number of codes of ethics meant for journalists, for example, but I get the impression that they remain good intentions and beautiful words but not in action. They seem restricted to the confines of journalists’ organizations but have failed so far to go out to the real world.

There is a lot of bias and prejudice, bad manners and grammar, knee-jerk reactions displayed in the media everyday. The lines separating news-reporting and advocacy work and partisan politics are intentionally blurred. We have mongrels like “infomercials” and PR offices trained in psywar tactics and demolition jobs.

I believe that for fairness to emerge, everyone has to have a living, intimate relationship with God. Without this, one cannot live full integrity and honesty, his resistance to the demons and temptations around can not go very far. He will relent sooner or later.

The codes of ethics, beautifully crafted, should, of course, be internalized. But they should be rooted on God himself and on no other principle. Otherwise, they will just remain a façade.

Everyone has to rectify his intentions. Any form of communication, any use of the word, oral or written, should be understood as a participation of the living word of God that always conveys the truth in charity. Outside of that orbit, we would be prone to misuse and abuse words.

Everyone also has to make continuing examinations of conscience to see if things were done right, or if there were some mistakes, omissions, etc. that need to be corrected or repaired. This should be an integral part of our lifestyle.

Sometimes I get intrigued to note that if in our ordinary daily life, we often realize at the end of the day that we have committed some mistakes and therefore we need to say sorry, why is it that in our big affairs as in politics and in media, one seldom hears of apologies made? As if there were no mistakes committed.

Again, what can account for this is the secularized culture we have at present. People get awkward relating their lives and their affairs to God. But God is where fairness springs.

Everyone has vocation

2011-08-25T07:36:00.001+08:00

WE all need to remind ourselves of this basic truth. All of us have a vocation. We have to sharpen that sense and make it the directing and shaping principle of our life.

Vocation is not only for a few, and for some special part of our life. It is for all of us, since as creatures and children of God, our relation with him is never broken. Our life will always be a life with him.

God continues to be with us, and while respecting our freedom always, he calls us to him, for it is him, more than us, who directs and shapes our life. This is the essence of vocation—God calling us to share his life and activity with us.

Let’s always remember that God created us for a purpose. He did not create us just to leave us on our own. He created us to participate in his life and in his love which is the essence of God.

This is what a vocation is. It is God inviting us to be with him, to correspond to the reality that God is already with us and wants us to actively participate in his plan for each one of us, which can assume an infinite variety of forms and ways.

Since God lives in eternity, his call to us, though discovered and carried out in time, springs also in eternity. In short, if we cooperate with him, we can say that what he starts with us will also be completed by him.

St. Paul says something relevant: “He who has begun a good work in you will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6)

It’s important that we realize ever more deeply that we are never alone, nor are we thinking and acting alone. We are always with our Lord. This awareness and our effort to correspond to that reality is what makes up our sense of vocation.

And so we have to realize that our vocation is meant to cover all our life, in all its aspects, and not just some parts of our life. Our vocation gives meaning to our whole life, projects us to our proper destiny.

Nothing is excluded from it, since God’s presence and interventions in our life are constant and abiding, and not just from time to time, nor from case to case. It covers our whole life, from beginning to end.

Thus, we need to develop the habit of going to our Lord for anything and everything that happens in our life. We can ask him questions, consult him, ask him for help, light and strength.

When we are in the dark, in doubt, gripped with fear, falling to cowardice, etc., we can ask, “Lord, where are you? Help me, Lord. What are you trying to tell me with this event or situation, Lord? How am I supposed to understand these things, how am I supposed to react and to behave at this time…?”

We can ask him to make his presence more felt, his will more clear, his way more accessible. We should not be afraid nor ashamed to make these demands, since God is our father, we are his children. We can tell him anything.

We should have the faith of the child who can ask anything and even complain to his father, but never doubts the love of his father. We need to be reminded of this ideal, since we cannot deny that in life we will pass through various and even severe trials that can test our faith.

That is why we have to base our sense of vocation on the firm ground of faith in God, of faith in its fullness, which means that it has to go all the way to the Cross which Christ, the fullness of revelation, embraced as the culmination of his redemptive work for us.

This will assure us that we will be faithful to our vocation. On God’s side, he is always faithful. His will for us is irrevocable. It’s on our side that we need to work out. Our fidelity and perseverance to our vocation would depend on how willing we are to embrace the Cross the way Christ embraced it.

Let’s go through the supreme drama Christ himself lived in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he begged his Father to let the cup pass him by, but rectifying himself in the end: “Not my will but yours be done.”

We should repeat those words often.

Existential formation

2011-08-23T10:22:00.001+08:00

THIS is what we all need—a lifelong formation. Our learning never ends, even if we already have accumulated tons of knowledge and skills through the years. In fact, the more we know, the more we should get convinced there's still a lot more to know.

In his second letter, St. Peter has this relevant words to say: “Do you on your part strive diligently to supply your faith with virtue, your virtue with knowledge, your knowledge with self-control, your self-control with patience, your patience with piety, your piety with fraternal love, your fraternal love with charity.” (1,5-7)

And this is because we are poised for infinity and eternity. The discrepancy between what we can and what we are poised to is not meant for us to stop learning, but rather to continue learning endlessly, by always asking for God's grace, since this enterprise is simply beyond human capacity.

Our formation has to embrace the whole of our existence. The things to know and master are not only infinite but are supposed to lead us to God, to know, love and serve Him more and more each day, and because of him, to love others as well. This should be the driving principle of our pursuit for formation. Short of this, we would be in trouble.

Apropos, St. Paul says these words:

"If anyone...does not agree with the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about controversies and disputes of words. From these arise envies, quarrels, blasphemies, base suspicions, the wranglings of men corrupt in mind and bereft of truth." (1 Tim 6,3-6)

How true! Just a quick glance around, and we can find hundreds of cases on a daily basis that give credence to these Pauline words. Outside of God, we would just be left on our own, either in the cold or in the heat of bitter conflicts among ourselves.

In short, we need to understand that the source and object of our formation is God himself, and not just any country's constitution, some ideological understanding of human rights, social or political consensus, current fads and fashions, etc.

These are man-made devices that need to be constantly animated and renewed by God's eternal wisdom. These are inadequate to face all the objective challenges of man in this world. They are lifeless unless vivified by God's spirit.

What can even worsen that condition is that they can act like plastic material that can be used and abused by us according to our motives and states in life, which can include ignorance, confusion, error, thoughless and passion-packed interventions, etc.

I am just amazed that many people, including many leaders, do not realize this. They seem contented to base everything simply on our own ideas, without making that vital linkage with the source and author of all Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

This connecting with God may be a very difficult task both on the personal and social levels, but it is not impossible. We just have to learn to handle it and persevere in it. We can commit mistakes, but as long as there is good faith, we can still manage to be truly connected with God.

We need to start as soon as possible a kind of paradigm shift in our thinking and attitudes, a revolution that should begin in our hearts before it spreads into our families, schools, offices, societies and the world in general. Doing things on our own, without God, just cannot take off, no matter how many the illusions of taking off are given to us.

Our leaders should lead in this. First, the Church officials—bishops, priests, etc. Then our teachers and political leaders. And given their privileged but delicate positions, the media people, celebrities and other prominent personages should feel the great need for a continuing formation.

Sometimes I get more amused than bothered when I hear slogans used by media people that they are supposed to be objective and fearless, defenders and lovers of the truth, etc., when all they do is spout their own ideas and opinions only. As the Cebuano slang used by the youth today would have it, “Estoryahee” (Tell it to the Marines!).

We have to be wary of false doctrine and ideology circulating around. “See to it that no one deceives you by philosophy and vain deceit, according to human traditions, to the elements of the world and not according to Christ,” St. Paul says (Col 2,8)

We need formation!

Constitution not above God’s law

2011-08-22T21:28:00.001+08:00

THIS has to be made clear. Nowadays, with almost everyone seeking refuge in our constitution and our legal and judicial systems when doing things that are clearly immoral or at least controversial according to one's beliefs and opinions, we need to know the right place these human institutions occupy in our life and affairs.

While the constitution obviously plays a capital and indispensable role in our country’s life, it is not the absolute, ultimate and universal law that governs all our life. It needs to be grounded on a more radical foundation and oriented toward an ever higher goal that should reflect the people’s growing understanding of life.

It cannot be static. It needs to be continually polished, refined and renewed. Its function of giving stability and order in our national life should not be made to detract from its inherent requirement for growth and development in time.

We should disabuse ourselves from the tendency to treat the constitution as the last bastion of what is right and wrong in life. At best, it can tell us what is legal and illegal, but it cannot fully capture the nuances that morality requires. It can establish and keep the rule of law in our country, but not the moral law.

For the latter, we need to go to God's law, to one's religion and church, or whatever instrumentalities one's religion uses for this purpose. Thus, in our constitution's preamble, we appeal to God for guidance.

“We, the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of Almighty God, in order to build a just and humane society and establish a Government...”

The challenge now is how to define and delineate the role of God in government, and in the many institutions we have—executive, legislative, judicial. Much of the problem we face today is that God's role is left in the dark, and made to lend itself to many, even conflicting, interpretations.

There are those who would like to establish a theocracy which, I believe, is wrong. Others go to the other extreme, communism, that rejects any reference to God in our national life. This cannot hold for long, as seen in the fall of the communist countries after some decades of artificial development and staged vitality.

In our case, we need to outgrow a funny notion of separation of Church and state that has been gripping us for years.

Our lawmakers should give more attention to this need. While it's correct that the state should not establish an official religion but should respect and even promote the religious practices of the different religions and churches in the country, it should be aware of the subsidiary role it plays in the religious affairs of its citizens.

This means at least two things. One is that it should not interfere in the practice of the different religions the people may have or when people don't have any religion at all. Especially in an increasingly pluralistic society, it should practice maximum tolerance and try to give everyone his due, regardless if he is morally right or wrong as judged by a particular religion or ideology, etc.

But, two, it should intervene when the free actions of persons and institutions in the area of religion result in competing interests, especially when these actions would cause grave injustice to some parties, and a significant danger in the area of peace and order.

It just cannot say that one's freedom of expression or artistic creativity, for example (as in the case of the controversial CCP exhibit), is constitutionally protected without considering the complaints of many other citizens.

To resolve tricky matters like this, I suppose the government has to determine which party has the more compelling reason. I am sure there will be some give-and-takes involved, but what it cannot do is to just give blanket permission to one party without giving due consideration to the other parties.

The primary role of the state is to take care of the temporal common good—peace and order, socio-economic and political development, etc. It should not usurp the religious, spiritual and moral affairs of the people.

Thus, in the RH Bill debate, the government should realize that it cannot impose this bill when a significant number are against it for religious, spiritual and moral reasons. What it can do is to leave the bill alone, and allow the people to pursue their beliefs and position in this issue according to their consciences. There the government cannot enter.

So, let's write RIP to the RH Bill.

Law has to be moral

2011-08-18T18:52:00.000+08:00

THE way issues are popping up these days, I believe we need an urgent reminder. We have limits. We are not our own creator. We need to be properly grounded and oriented. We have to obey a law that we ourselves do not make or invent, but is given to us to discover, articulate, ratify and follow.

We just disposed—hopefully—that ugly episode of that blasphemous CCP art exhibit, and got reminded that artists in their creativity just cannot wantonly use or abuse the freedom of expression without considering, at least, the sensitivities of the others.

This is not even to consider yet the religious criteria that also have their place in the sun. So let's leave them aside, for the meantime. Displaying in the state-run CCP supposed artworks that contain phalluses and condoms and clear gestures of mockery are offensive enough even with unknown subjects. How much more when religious images revered by millions are used? Thus, the fury.

I don't know why so much investigation has to be done over this incident when common sense would be enough to brand it as unworthy for display. But it seems times are a-changing. In fact, we have a new issue—rather an old, aging one that continues to be resuscitated by its proponents—coming up.

I'm referring to Senator Miriam Santiago's view that the RH Bill would have to pass since it is not against our constitution, it is part of our right to privacy. Are the RH people now desperate that they have to resort to this no-brainer?

There are million other things that are not in our constitution that our common sense itself would tell us outright they should be rejected, avoided, prohibited. Thinking and speaking badly of others is just one of them.

There are a million other things done in privacy that are simply wrong, illegal, immoral, sinful, and no one, let alone, public authorities, can prevent. Bad thoughts, bad desires, etc., are some of them.

This is again a clear case of legalism gone nuts. When our legal and judicial system makes itself its own source of authority, when it just depends on the ideas of some legislators, or the consensus of people, without making a clear reference to God's law, then it becomes rife for abuses.

The main problem, of course, is that many of our politicians and public officials seem averse to the idea that they have to be consistent to their faith to do their work of governance or legislation or dispensing justice.

They want to stay in an undefined, vague area which they call freedom, a secularized freedom detached from its source which is God. There they can do anything, including going directly against what is clearly defined as God's commandments and natural law, and still call it freedom.

An even worse scenario is when these politicians and public officials now arrogate to themselves or to the people the power to define what is moral and immoral, and then proceed to legalize them.

Our legal and judicial system, our human laws can never fully capture God's eternal law that governs us. That's why it should always be in a state of improvement and refinement, without compromising its stabilizing, constant and permanent character. It can be a tricky affair that we just have to learn to handle and hopefully master.

What is clear is that our laws should be moral. They should be based on the natural moral law written in our hearts by our Creator, which we have to articulate and develop. But at best, our laws can only regulate human acts that are more or less external, observable, measurable. They cannot go far into thoughts, motives, desires and other finer points of human life and actvitiy.

How do you legislate about delicadeza, for example? At best you can give some social norms about it, but they remain largely in the externals.

Our human laws, therefore, cannot be the ultimate source of what is right and wrong, what ought to be done or prohibited, etc. What is legal cannot capture the fullness of the morality of the human act. I may follow the law of getting a driver's license, but if that is badly motivated or done as a complement to a sinful act, then it is immoral.

Our politicians, public officials, legislators, judges, etc., should take the step to link themselves and their work to the moral law that comes from God, taught by the Church whose power to do so comes from God, not from men.

Is chastity possible?

2011-08-17T19:49:00.000+08:00

THE answer, of course, is a resounding Yes! It’s God’s will in the first place. And He will always give us the means necessary. He does not design us for it and just leave us alone to do whatever we can. He gives us the means in abundance.

And if we correspond, if we put our mind and heart into it, if we are determined to fight—for tremendous, formidable enemies we have in this area—then chastity need not be an elusive dream or a false hope or a wishful thinking, but rather a joyful affirmation of love, a way to assert our identity with God and with others.

God created us in his image and likeness, and with his grace, elevated us to be children of his, meant to participate in his own life, not only in our spirit, but also in our body. We are image and likeness of God, children of his, both in body and soul, and not only in one without the other.

That means that though there is a distinction between our bodily and spiritual dimensions, we should not forget that there is a fundamental unity between them, meant to be unbreakable. Absent that unity, we would fatally compromise our humanity.

The body then has to be fully infused with the spirit. And the spirit, which is our soul, should fully animate the body. The body has to materialize our spiritual life. The soul has to spiritualize our material world.

All this dynamism of the mutual relationship between the body and the soul that is initiated and governed by the love of God should be sustained by us with God’s grace and our effort.

This is where the virtue of chastity comes in, a virtue that becomes more challenging given the wounded and weakened condition of our body-and-soul relationship.

Without chastity, we would be doing violence to our nature. We would open the floodgates to all sorts of immoralities and perversions. We would be spiritually blind and morally handicapped, since only the pure of heart can see God, as our Lord said. In this regard, we don’t have to look far to verify this truth.

Yet the enormity and complexity of the problem provoked by the non-living of chastity is also a great opportunity for us to have a deep conversion and return to God and to a straight and clean moral life. There is always hope, as long as we react.

Chastity starts when we fill our mind and heart with good things—love for God and for others, expressed always in deeds and not just in intention and words. We need to be driven by love. When we find ourselves idle, empty, or just languishing and drifting without clear directions, we have a problem that should be solved immediately.

Chastity gathers strength when we always pray, when we have the basic attitude of looking for God in everything and in everyone, able to refer everything to God. It grows to the extent that we give ourselves to the others, helping them in whatever way we can, avoiding self-centeredness and self-absorption.

Chastity is protected when we keep ourselves busy, when we make ourselves truly contrite in our confession and transparent in our spiritual direction, not afraid to be known as we really are and docile to follow the indications.

Chastity is defended when we wage a continuing battle against our weaknesses and the temptations around. We should never forget that our life is a warfare. We cannot afford to sit pretty and be complacent.

We should not allow our weaknesses and the temptations to chill us into discouragement. Rather they have to spur us to get closer to our Lord, and to use all the supernatural and human means available.

Sometimes the battles are no mere skirmishes but fierce hand-to-hand combats that can leave us deeply wounded. But it would be all worthwhile. With God’s grace and our effort, we are assured of victory always. Even our falls and mistakes can be victories if we know how to handle them and make use of them to get closer to God.

From the personal plane, we should try to bring the fight for chastity to the higher level of cleaning our environment morally. There’s a lot of pollution and corruption around—pornography easily accessible, public displays of indecencies, bad example from prominent persons, accepted social practices that are immoral, etc.

We should try to get our act together to wage this struggle with families, church, schools, government, etc., cooperating synergistically.

Mending a broken world

2011-08-16T18:26:00.001+08:00

NOW they are starting to admit it. The world is broken and it needs mending badly. At least, that's how political leaders and commentators are saying about the riots and looting that erupted in London recently.

British Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the ugly incident to a “slow-motion moral collapse” of a good number of his constituents, especially the young. American columnist Peggy Noonan had a similar take. She said:

“The British press, left, right and center, was largely united in a refusal to make political excuses for the violence. Almost all agreed on the cause and nature of what happened. The cause was not injustice; this was not a revolt of the downtrodden masses, breaking into stores looking for food.

“The causes were greed, selfishness, a respect and even lust for violence, and a lack of moral grounding. Conscienceless predators preyed upon the weak. The weak were anyone who happened to be passing by, and those, many of them immigrants, who tried to defend their shops and neighborhoods...”

This is a developed country that is suffering from this calamity. If it were a lesser nation, like ours, it would have been more understandable. But this is one of the leading countries of the world, not only in terms of economics and but also in culture and civilization.

What has happened?

I'm sure there will be many views and opinions about this, all with their valid points. It's worthwhile to look into them because they certainly will shed light on the incident.

But I'm also sure that the analyses will stop short of considering the role of God, of faith and religion in maintaining true peace and order, genuine harmony in any given society. And that would guarantee that the disaster will continue.

If the root cause is not touched, if the remedies stay only on the level of relieving the symptoms, dispensing palliatives only instead of the real curing medicine, then we would just be delaying and, worse, most likely building up a bigger catastrophe.

The British Prime Minister promised to undertake a “root and branch review” of all government policies to tackle the problem. But would that comprehensive effort include God, religion, faith that are supposed to give spirit and life to morality?

If morality is understood only as a matter of what is politically or socially correct, of what is culturally acceptable and the like, of how big a police force should be to deter such unrests, then forget it. The moral collapse in Britain as in any other country will continue to fester.

We all need to realize that the morality of our human acts is based on God, on religion, on faith. It just cannot be grounded on a political or social ideology, or guided only by the criteria of practicality, popular consensus, etc., much less by instigating fear or getting into coercion. We would miss the mark by a mile.

The problem that besets the world today is the bias that in politics and government affairs, God and religion should as much as possible be set aside. While it's true that the distinction between faith and politics should be made and their autonomy respected, it's also true that we should also respect their innate organic link.

We need to overcome this problem first. I know it has many aspects that need to be tackled properly, and they can be tricky. Just the same, this problem has to be licked. It can be done. It should be done, despite its difficulties.

How do you resuscitate a society suffering from moral collapse? By strengthening its spiritual life first, its relation with God. This means a massive program of formation that would enhance the development of virtues, a deepening knowledge of the authentic good of man—and this is God—and an abiding ascetical struggle.

If we take a cursory look around, I'm afraid that these concerns are hardly or badly attended to. Sadly, they now look like fossils hidden away in a corner of a school laboratory. In fact, many people, educated ones at that, scoff at these concepts.

They believe that morality should be about freedom to do anything as long as he does not cause any physical or external harm on others. For them, morality is just a matter of what is legally permitted and prohibited.

With such mentality, we are actually light years away from the ideal situation. It's a big problem, but also a big challenge and chance to do something truly great in the world. Would we accept the challenge?

Foul!

2011-08-15T18:00:00.000+08:00

THAT firestorm caused by the blasphemous “Kulo” exhibit at the CCP showed among other things that even artists in the exercise of their freedom of expression and creativity can commit a foul that can merit a red card. They can overstep their limits.

They should be most careful in their work. Since their work is often pioneering, since it is often breaking new frontiers, artists have to expect to raise eyebrows, to be open to misunderstanding among ordinary mortals, and be ready for it.

Obviously, they can do a lot of good since with their artistry which is a great gift, dubbed in the Catechism as “a freely given superabundance of the human being’s inner riches,” they can offer glimpses of sublime truth, goodness and beauty to the rest of humanity who are otherwise stuck in the banalities of daily life.

Artists often provide alternative beautiful ways of conveying truth and beauty that otherwise cannot be captured in words. They have the gift to enter into people’s mind and heart in ways that go beyond logic and rhetoric.

They therefore have to be aware of their privileged position in society and of the delicate responsibility attached to it. The first thing they have to realize is that their artistry and creativity are a gift of God. These have to be acknowledged as such, and not just a human or natural phenomenon with no deeper foundation.

Failing in that fundamental duty would lead artists to drift to nowhere. They would open themselves to the slavery of their passions and prejudices, and to mere external factors—fads and popular practices and customs, etc. These can pull subtle strings that can deceive us with their supposed advantages while hiding their dangers.

That’s why we can have such exhibit as “Kulo” that was packaged as a way to question and to enter into dialogue and debate about faith and religion. I was just wondering that if that was the purpose, then why would those behind it start that dialogue by offending the sensibilities of their supposed target audience? And why bring it to the general public and not to some controlled environment yet?

It’s amazing that many artists think that they can only be most expressive and creative when they do not have to think about God. This is a very dangerous situation, since they deny the truth that God is the source of creativity. Their creativity is, in fact, always a sharing of the creativity of God.

They fail to realize that their talent is always a gift, something given and received, and that therefore it is not completely theirs. It is not self-generated, nor something that once given entitles them to forget the giver.

Obviously this incident is a manifestation of a world gone secularized, where God is banished away. Many people are just depending on their own ideas to know what is good or bad, right or wrong.

I was mortified the other day, for example, while in taxi and the driver was listening to a radio commentary on some political issue. The commentator, who was supposed to be a prominent media man, was dripping with self-righteousness, speaking as if all his pronouncements are dogmas that cannot be questioned by anyone.

He sounded as if he had the monopoly of truth and justice, the exclusive owner if not the very creator of what true and good in this world. With very weak basis for his statements, he flew into a rage, making below-the-belt blows to his target politician at that time. It was a clear case of character assassination.

It made me think that with the way some journalists are, killing them would come as no surprise. Of course, it is not good. It should never be done. But with the way they comment, done with the air of impunity, I believe that they can invite their own assassination.

This is what happens when God is not at the center of our lives and of our affairs. This is what happens when we would just depend on ourselves. We would just be left to our own devices. We could not see the big picture nor listen and consider the positions of others. And we easily could degenerate to chaos.

This was what some observers said about the violent riots that erupted in London recently. They said it is not so much about politics and economics as it is about Godless people who have abandoned God and taken the law into their hands.

We have to shout, “Foul!”

The power of faith

2011-08-13T18:00:00.000+08:00

FAITH is a gift from God given to us so we can initiate our life with him, which is how our life ought to be. Let’s remember that our life is always a shared life with God. It cannot be any other way. We did not come to exist just spontaneously, out of the blue. We have been created, and we have been created for a purpose.

As creatures, we already have God our Creator at the core of our being, since our very existence depends on him. We don’t live by bread alone. We live, we exist because God keeps us in existence.

As persons, we are endowed with the spiritual faculties of intelligence and will whose principle and end can be no other than God. Our thinking and reasoning, our willing and loving, even our feeling and passions would just be floating and drifting here and there if they do not begin and end with God.

As children of God, we are the object of God’s unwavering love. Not even our sins can alter that love. It's only when we drive him away for good that we lose our contact with him.

In short, God is always with us. And he intervenes in our life all the time. We need to acknowledge this aspect of the reality that governs us and act accordingly. That's why, we should live a life faith, not just remaining in the level of reasoning and feeling.

We need to make some drastic changes in the way we understand ourselves, the way we see our life and the corresponding behavior we should be having. Fact is we still are light years away from that ideal.

Many of us, even those who proclaim themselves Christians, do not know exactly what the role of faith in our life is. For a good number of us, faith is just some pious ornament that can be put on and off at one's convenience.

Even those who say they are leading a life of faith belie their fervent affirmations because of the many areas of inconsistencies in their Christian life. And that's also because many may say they have faith, but are ignorant of its content, its practical implications and consequences.

Which is lamentable, because with faith not pursued and lived, or not lived properly, we would just be left to our own devices which, perhaps, can lead us somewhere but not where we ought to be.

We would be living not only away from God, but most likely against God. We would be deprived of God's wisdom and power. Let's remember that only when one has faith do miracles happen. It when we have faith that the impossible becomes possible.

The Letter to the Hebrews says something of the marvels that faith has done to some people:

“By faith Abel offered to God a sacrifice exceeding that of Cain, by which he obtained a testimony that he was just...

“By faith Henoch was translated, that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God had translated him...

“Without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that comes to God must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him...

“By faith Noe, having received an answer concerning those things which as yet were not seen, moved with fear, framed the ark for the saving of his house, by which he condemned the world...” (Heb 11)

We need to study the content of our faith and try our best to live it as consistently as possible, always asking for the grace of God. Living by faith, in effect, means developing a contemplative lifestyle that would enable us to see God in everything and in everyone.

It means that our assessment of things (the many events, challenges, projects, problems, successes, failures, etc. that make up our life) is not done only in the level of reason in its many aspects (philosophy, common sense, politics, economics, etc.), but is guided and enlightened by faith, by what God tries to tell us in the many ways he communicates with us.

We have to make this business of thinking and living in faith a part not only of our personal lives, but also of our culture where everyone is sustained in his faith. We have to say enough with a lifestyle that treats faith as an alien, or a burden, or something that is inhuman.

And in this task, everyone is involved and contributes to the extent that he can.

Temperance, mortification, penance

2011-08-10T11:29:00.001+08:00

THESE are important and indispensable needs in our life. Without them, we would live handicapped and disoriented. While we have to consider many requirements and face challenges in life, we should never forget to make an abiding self-examination with respect to these virtues.

Let’s not be naïve. From our own personal weaknesses and errant, wild urges to the intoxicating temptations around, we have to contend with tremendous pressures to forget and neglect these virtues.

Truth is we are pushed to get disengaged from God and from others, and to plunge headlong into self-love, which is actually our doom. In fact, we need special efforts to keep ourselves on course, on the right track in our relationship with God and with others.

The media abet this situation. More mindful with profitability and popularity, they practically leave behind the finer demands of morality and spirituality. In fact, they deftly make use of legitimate values, like rights and freedom, rationality and practicality, and the ignorance and vulnerability of the people, to inject effects toxic to us.

We now have, for example, the celebrity syndrome where physical beauty, talents, and accomplishments in the fields of sports, arts and theater, etc., are exploited to market frivolity, vanity, greed, sensuality, envy, etc. These may not be explicitly intended, but they come just the same, and those concerned just try to play blind.

Today’s movies and TV shows now seem to aim at riveting and nailing our senses to the here and now, to the shallow and the pleasurable, to our untamed subliminal instincts, while starving our intelligence and our faith.

They seem to declare war against sobriety, serious thinking and pious believing. In short, they tend to bring out the animal or the savage and the pagan in each one of us. That seems to be their hidden agenda.

Instead of making us more human, more of a person, more rational and spiritual, we are made to be more sensual and irrational, more of an object and target of immoral or at least amoral campaigns than a subject who is supposed to be free, intelligent, responsible and deserving respect always.

It’s a wild, wild world out there in the media. I am afraid it will take time before things settle down. I am of the belief that what is wrong, unfair or immoral will sooner or later be corrected, perhaps only after so much blood, sweat and tears. I believe that immoral laws and practices will backfire and correct themselves in time.

Meanwhile, it’s good that we cultivate the virtues of temperance and penance with their corresponding practice of mortification. They serve to put us on the ground, giving us sure footing and a good hold on reality, when we tend to fly into our fantasy world.

Temperance, mortification and penance can do us a lot of good by purifying us and strengthening us spiritually and morally. They dispose us to enter into the deeper and wider reality of our faith. They give us a fuller picture of our life even as providing us also with life's finer details.

The spirit of penance, for example, shows us the true state of our human condition. And that is that we have been born in original sin which, though erased through baptism, leaves us with a scar of concupiscence, a certain attraction to evil that leads us to commit sin.

Penance makes us feel the need to be contrite for our sins, to ask for forgiveness, especially through the sacrament of confession, and to make up for our sins, doing many acts of atonement and reparation.

We should never leave this aspect of our life, together with its allied need for temperance and mortification, unattended. Everyday, along with our many legitimate human desires, plans and ambitions, we should plot out the concrete program of how to live and develop these virtues and practices.

Let's remember that our Lord clearly told us to enter by the narrow gate, and to avoid the big, wide one that leads to our perdition. He also told us that if we have to follow him, we need to deny ourselves and take up our cross.

These indications should not remain in words or desires alone. They have to be lived if we truly want to lead an authentic Christian life, full of goodness, meaning and love for one another, whatever the circumstances may be.

Let's see to it that no day should pass by without the cross. We need it like we need air.

Molding the future

2011-08-09T21:52:00.001+08:00

We have to keep in mind the World Youth Day to be held in Madrid, August 16-21, with Pope Benedict giving it its climactic point. Seeing a big gathering of youth simply astounds us. It’s like seeing the future.

The youth indeed hold the key to what is to come. How they are now determines to a certain extent the character of the world in the next generation. And so we need to see to it that our young ones receive the proper formation now.

This is the challenge we, the elders, have. Preparing the youth for the future is a task that is becoming more exciting, more daunting, precisely because of the complicated issues that practically wrap the world today.

As the Pope has been saying for some time now, the world ethos seems to be suffused with what is more technically known as moral relativism. It’s an attitude, a mentality, and even a lifestyle and culture that banishes any moral absolutes, while making tolerance an absolute law to follow.

It ultimately boils down to denying the existence of God, and to the belief that things just depend completely on us. So, morality or what is to be considered good or bad would just be a matter of opinions, consensus, and would just be based on such criteria as practicality, popularity, convenience, and the like.

In the end, we are making ourselves our own God. We deny that we are creatures, that our existence is something given and received, not self-generated. We deny that we need to be with God always, to put our mind and heart on him.

With this mindset, a good part of the world, especially the more developed Western part, has gone to the extent of legalizing abortion, mercy-killing, same-sex marriage, etc.

If we are not careful, this scourge is going to enter our own country also. There are already clear signs. The RH Bill, touted Divorce bill that some groups are pushing, the same-sex marriage buzz that we hear around—these are symptoms of an emerging moral confusion that threatens to be made part of our law and culture.

We have to give due attention to our youth today, equipping them with the means that would help them tackle the great responsibility before them. I was happy to learn that a big group of young people went to a UN conference and made their voices heard. They were complaining about a document, still in the making, that contained precisely questionable moral positions. That's a good sign.

Caring for the youth is no easy task at all. My own experience with dealing with young college students for many years indicates that they need abiding attention, a lot of patience and understanding, a good amount of flexibility and creativity, and at the same time, an unwavering hold on the faith and the doctrines that go with it.

Each one has to be handled in a very personal way. Away with putting them in boxes and branding and stereotyping them. Once this personal relationship is established, then things can be expected to go far.

The young people need constant encouragement. They sometimes strike me as toddlers who are still learning to walk properly—in the moral and spiritual life. They can be up one moment, and down the next moment. But they have a lot of energy to go on.

We just have to make sure that they are given the solid dose of formation in all its aspects—human, spiritual, doctrinal, apostolic and professional. We have to make sure that these aspects are properly integrated through the impulse of a genuine love for God and for others, because only then can they acquire a life and creativity of their own.

Caring for the youth actually never stops. It's just one stage in a life-long process. We just have to make it clear to them that our life requires continuing formation, continuing conversions and renewals, an endless process of having to begin and begin again.

In their weak moments or when they are down, we have to be quick to remotivate them, showing them new horizons and strong reasons to hope and to be optimistic. We have to show them the way, getting practical ourselves and not just remaining in the theories.

We should try to adapt ourselves to them, and if possible to speak their language, without abdicating our role as elders and teachers. In the end, we can only help them properly if we ourselves take care of own spiritual and moral lives. We can't give what we don't have.

Priestly celibacy

2011-08-05T21:58:00.000+08:00

I KNOW I am treading on dangerous water here. But I feel the issue has to be aired somehow. Priestly celibacy just cannot be marginalized, especially now when it is vastly misunderstood and a persistent wave of misconceptions continues to assail it.

There are those who think that priestly celibacy is just an ecclesiastical law meant perhaps to serve some practical purposes in the life of the priest and of the Church.

For sure, there is a good amount of practicality in a priest leading a celibate life. For one, it would make his life simpler, largely undisturbed by domestic concerns. The priest’s heart, time and attention could get more focused, more undivided for God and others if he is celibate.

The Church leaders, bishops in particular, who are supposed to take care of their priests even financially, need not worry about having to support the families of these priests. The Church can run more smoothly with celibate priests.

But there are those who also think that a priest can manage to work properly and even to be holy without being celibate. Proof of this, they say, is the growing number of married people who are also very active in Church affairs and thus are practically working like priests themselves.

Some even say that these lay people can be more dynamic and effective than some priests. So, why can’t priests be considered like them? Or at least, why not make priestly celibacy optional? For those who want it, fine. But please don’t impose it on everyone!

They claim that priests are also men and that they have certain needs that cannot be met in a celibate life. To rub it in, they say that many priests are actually not leading continent or chaste life. Ok, the point is made. Pertinent pieces of evidence are aplenty. So let’s stop there.

We can actually go on and on with the pros and cons of priestly celibacy. I imagine that arguments, examples and statistics to support both sides will never be lacking. But I think we would be missing the point if we frame this issue within the parameters of practicality, human needs and ecclesiastical law alone.

The law on priestly celibacy is not just about practicality. It has a deeper reason. And ultimately it rests on the truth that priests are conformed to Christ as head of the Church. They act “in persona Christi,” and as such, they are expected to live like Christ in his full status as the Son of God who became man to redeem mankind.

Priests are the sacramental image of Christ wherever they are, 24/7. While their priesthood is most lived when they renew the sacrifice of Christ’s on the cross in the Holy Mass, they continue to be “in persona Christi” even in their sports, shopping and sleep.

Priestly celibacy is actually an intrinsic requirement of priesthood, because Christ himself, on whom priests are conformed sacramentally and ontologically, that is, affecting one’s being, was/is celibate, his will fully engaged with the will of his Father.

Recent studies show that while the law on priestly celibacy was first recorded in the 4th century, it must already have been required and lived during the time of the apostles. In short, the apostles must have understood their priesthood to involve celibacy.

Proof of this can be gleaned from that gospel passage where Peter who, like many of the apostles, was married, told our Lord that he has left everything behind to follow Christ. (cfr Mk 10,28ff.)

“Behold, we have left all things, and have followed you,” Peter said. And Jesus answered: “Amen, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who shall not receive a hundred times as much, now in this time, houses and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands with persecutions, and in the world to come life everlasting.”

And so, it is quite clear that during the time of the apostles, those apostles who were married understood that once they were ordained, they had to let go of their conjugal relations, of course in a voluntary way between the spouses.

This mindset is reflected in all the historically recorded laws about priestly life and celibacy in the Western Church. The Eastern Church followed a more tortuous path but somehow also upheld priestly celibacy. Those laws were precisely made to protect, not impose, this intrinsic requirement of celibacy in priesthood.

The bully pulpit

2011-08-01T22:10:00.000+08:00

THIS expression became famous when first used by US President Theodore Roosevelt. Initially, it had a positive meaning, as it simply meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda. But now, it refers more to the undue advantage one can have because of his position, office or work to rally support for a particular view.

I suppose it has reference to the church’s elevated stand, now hardly used, where priests preach at Mass. Obviously when priests abuse that function of preaching the word of God, and prefer to be demagogues or political partisans instead of being prophetic priests faithful to their mission, turning their homilies into harangues, complete with scolding and lecturing tones, they convert the pulpit into a bully.

But the expression is now more associated with public officials, politicians, media people, public relations practitioners, big businessmen, celebrities, ideologues of the left and of the right, advocacy and cause-oriented groups. Not that these people are no good. They are necessary and relevant—in varying degrees, of course—in any society.

But because of their money, power, privileges, connections, clout, etc., plus the pressures and challenges of their position, they can easily get intoxicated and trigger a mechanism that arouses their hatred, greed, lust, envy, or pure malice and lack of faith in God and a generalized skepticism toward everything and everyone, drowning in their own cynicism.

They can finance demolition jobs, organize rallies and stage demonstrations, pay columnists and radio block timers, hire public relations outfits to build or destroy reputations. They can sow intrigues, plant moles in different places, do espionage and intelligence work.

They can actually do anything just to achieve their evil ends. With the thinnest of basis like mere gossips and rumors, they can launch into an open, frontal attack on persons and institutions, generating a feeding frenzy and lynching mentality on their victims, not giving them the benefit of the doubt nor allowance to explain themselves.

They make gratuitous comments, hardly supported by any trace of R & D (research and development), often transmitting them recklessly and with impunity. They like absolutizing their opinions. Their targets are automatically branded as guilty and the vilest of men, attaching to them the worst of motives.

It’s good that we are aware of this phenomenon, so that we can be duly protected from the subtle twists and spins, the growing misinformation and disinformation that some people throw around to defend their self-interests at the expense of truth, justice and the common good.

We cannot be naïve and passive every time we consider the views and opinions of people. At this time, we need to be extra discerning and even critical in the analytic sense, because it is beyond doubt that many forces are at play and a good number of them are on the sly.

Take, for example, the case of the global warming alarmists and the demolition job of the so-called “Pajero bishops.” In spite of the clarifications and corrections of some of their claims, they continue to rationalize their own positions and attribute bad intentions on those who disagree with them, even if these are already authorities and experts.

Lately, the global warming alarmists have been corrected on their data about heat unable to escape the earth atmosphere and polar bears drowning in the North Pole supposedly because of massive melting of ice. In spite of contradicting data, they persist in their alarmism without offering counter-proofs.

Regarding the “Pajero bishops,” some opinion-makers are impugning certain people who are trying to help bishops by initiating a fund campaign for the bishops. These commentators suspect the move is purely political. I suppose they only see what they want to see or the tricks that they themselves play.

We have to examine ourselves and see to it that our integrity is intact and ever strengthened, grounded always on God and not just on us. Always a dynamic affair, it involves daily struggles against temptations and pressures. This is the indispensable element to assure objectivity and fairness in our judgments and pronouncements.

We also need to cultivate the appropriate attitudes and skills to undertake a healthy dialogue and fruitful debate on issues—open-mindedness, courtesy, ability to listen and understand the positions of others, even if they are contradictory to ours, etc.

These days, we have to be most aware of the need to have an interdisciplinary approach to the issues, giving special attention to the moral and spiritual aspects, and not just to the economic, political or social side.

Going home!

2011-07-31T22:07:00.000+08:00

EVERYDAY, we need to go home, or at least, go to a place where we can rest and feel at ease physically and emotionally, surrounded by people who know and love us, who understand us no matter what we do.

Home is where we can expect security and stability amid the ups and downs of our daily life. It’s where we can be at our most transparent state, showing ourselves as we really are.

It’s like the cradle of our whole life, because even if we are quite old and mature, we continue to be like babies when we consider the full dimensions of our life.

The tragedy of our times is that many homes are not homes as we know and want them, but simply places where we can sleep, and perhaps do our unavoidable and basic personal and physical necessities.

Sad to say, many homes have long been deprived of the atmosphere proper to them—where love and understanding reign, where one recharges not only physically but also spiritually and morally.

Many homes have become dysfunctional for a variety of reasons—absentee parents, lack of family life, poor communication, etc. They have been reduced to offer nothing more than the minimal physical or material comfort. The spiritual and moral dimension is neglected.

So, it’s possible that one can actually be homeless even if he thinks he is at home. The worse scenario is when one doesn’t even have a home to go to at the end of the day, and lives a more or less nomadic life. In fact, there are people who are jokingly referred to as NPA (no permanent address).

How important it is therefore to continually build up the home, ever strengthening the elements and forces that go into its vitality—love and understanding, concern for one another, mutual affirmation, availability, etc.—translating all this into concrete actions and other details and not remaining in the level of ideas and intentions only.

Many people are unaware of that Pauline advice to “bear each other’s burdens,” (Gal 6,2) which is at the core of charity and fraternity in the family. Many couples enter marriage only with good intentions, but ill-equipped to tackle the duties and responsibilities of being spouses and parents. They try to build homes already handicapped.

There are many other issues besetting family and home life these days, and they need to be urgently attended to. In this, not only should the Church be concerned. The government too can contribute a lot—and much more than just giving material support.

Unfortunately, there are moves that show that instead of giving the proper moral and spiritual support, the government is pushing for immoral measures—promoting contraception, moving towards legalization of divorce and same-sex marriage, etc.—that would clearly undermine rather than strengthen the families and the homes.

The problem is that there is that secularistic attitude gripping many government officials who tend to completely ostracize faith, religion and the morals as defined by faith and reason. To them, considering these elements is not politically correct, is undemocratic, or is “ungovernmental.” They have a paganistic outlook.

And this brings us to the real bone of contention. We have leaders in politics and in society who do not realize that our ultimate home is God himself, from whom we come and to whom we belong, not only in a physical way but more so, in the spiritual and intimate way.

We all need to expand and deepen our understanding of home. It’s not just a physical structure, nor even a moral entity but with strictly natural dimensions. We need to go all the way to understand it as being in communion with God and with everybody else. Home is nothing less than that.

This is easier said than done, of course. Thus, we need to do a lot of training, since considering God as home requires us to go beyond strictly natural and human dimensions. It requires us, for example, to expect and find meaning in sacrifice and suffering. And this is not easy, since it goes against our natural tendencies.

Considering God as home involves us to regard prayer, mortification, the sacraments, ascetical struggle, developing virtues, etc., like the eating, drinking, comfort, fun, relaxation, affection, etc. as the essential elements in the natural sense of home life.

Saints who have achieved to be at home with God go to their prayer and sacrifice the way we normally look forward to our family meals and get-togethers.

Both nearest and farthest

2011-07-30T10:51:00.000+08:00

THAT’S how God is to us. He is both the one nearest to us and also the one farthest. But he never leaves us, even if we leave him. He will always be with us, until we definitively would drive him away.

He is nearest to us, because as our creator, he is at the core of our existence. For as long as we exist, it is God our creator, the giver of our existence, who keeps us alive and kicking in this life and in the hereafter.

Though we may not notice it, he is actually in our every thought, desire, word and action, in every pore of our being. Let’s hope that we can be more aware of this reality, so that we can conform ourselves to it properly. We seem to ignore it most of the time.

We also know that he is our Father who loves us no end. He always intervenes in our life. Indeed, there’s no moment, no part or episode in our life where he is not there. His interventions are meant to give us guidance, wisdom, power, peace, etc. in our life. He is everything to us, since our life cannot but be a shared life with him always.

He is also the farthest, since he is the most mysterious being we can ever encounter. He just surpasses our capacity to know him fully. But this should not come as a surprise, because even in our daily relations with our loved ones, we may know a lot about them, but certainly we neither would know them fully.

What is important is that we ought to know enough of him as to keep a constant, intimate relationship with him. Somehow we should be aware of his presence all the time and, in fact, should refer to him all the things that happen in our day, asking and consulting him, and especially begging for his help, because more than us, it’s him who gives proper care and direction in our life.

It should not be hard to find him everywhere, because by putting ourselves in his presence or when we call to him, he would already be in touch with him. As our Father who loves us, he is ready to come to us. He actually does not play hard to get.

We need to constantly ask him: Lord, how should I react to this particular situation? How should I behave, how should I understand this development? What are you trying to tell me or show me with this turn of events?

Especially when we find ourselves in difficulties, or in the grip of a persistent temptation, this is what we should always do. We should be wary of our tendency to do things on our own, relying solely on our reasoning, our feelings, our estimations.

We need to live by faith moment to moment, to be more immersed in God especially when we are in some decisive moments or before a most seducing temptation occasioned by wealth, power, fame.

Yes, we always need to use our reason, our feelings, our imagination, creativity and the rest of our human faculties. But these without faith would just go in circles and can pose a great danger to us.

It is faith, that is, when we are with God, when we can truly penetrate into the essence of things, discern the direction of the confusing flow of events, find meaning in the most inscrutable phenomenon we can meet. We can move toward a fuller understanding of reality when we live by faith.

For this to happen, we need to pray always, study the doctrine of our faith, develop the different virtues that actually resemble us with our Lord more and more, have recourse to the sacraments where Christ gives us his grace, etc.

We may also need to have some human devices, some tricks and gimmicks we can use to keep us always in the presence of God, ever referring things to him and not just contented with keeping them to ourselves since we might feel we already understand them. We have to avoid this frame of mind.

Another important element is humility. We have to continually deepen and strengthen our humility, that awareness that we are nothing without God, because our default behavior seems to be pride, self-complacency, self-sufficiency. We need to be at war with these tendencies all the time.

It’s also humility that leads us to keep on looking for God, always feeling the need to begin and begin again.

Yes, we can!

2011-07-25T22:16:00.001+08:00

WE need these days to develop and continually strengthen our sense of confidence and optimism, since we now seem to be buffeted right and left with pressures, challenges, problems, difficulties and controversies.

We have to consciously do this now, otherwise it’s very likely that we can slip into despair or bitterness, and that would not be good for us. In fact, some reports have it that the number of cases of mental illness, even of educated people cracking up and flipping, has increased lately.

We cannot allow fears, uncertainty, doubts, pressures, anguish, anxieties and worries, to bully us to depression and helplessness. We need not only to stay alive, but also to be vibrant, active, with a keen sense of direction.

We have to be wary when signs or symptoms of creeping sadness and a gripping sense of meaninglessness in life come. We have to react immediately. The ideal situation when we are faced with some trouble should be what St. Paul once described:

“We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed…” (2 Cor 4,8-9) In fact, we have to know how to convert crisis situations into moments of salvation and perfection.

For this purpose, we can use that reply made by the apostles James and John together with their mother, when our Lord asked them whether they could “drink the chalice” that he was going to drink, meaning, whether they were willing to accept the suffering our himself was going to have.

They simply and boldly said, “We can,” a reply that has reverberated through the ages and has infused unaccountable impulses of courage and hope to many people. We too can repeat these words many times during the day, doing it with the same spirit with which the apostles said it, so we can at least feel good and attract God’s power.

As much as possible, we should avoid losing our peace of mind and our sense of joy, even as we unavoidably get into situations of excitement and suspense, or worse, situations of failures and mistakes.

This is a skill we have to learn to acquire—how to remain calm and confident, sporty and flexible, knowing how to survive and make do with whatever situation, and in fact, how to derive good even from mishaps.

And we can do it when we earnestly pray, meditate on God’s word, when we make many acts of faith and hope and love. We have to remember that only in God can we find meaning for all and every situation and predicament we can meet in life.

That’s because God is our Creator, our Father, our all. He is the author of reality, and therefore the standard and measure of everything that happens in our life. With his providence, he is always with us, guiding us, showing us the way, telling us how to understand the different events in our life.

We should avoid just relying on our reasoning alone, or on our cleverness, our human resources and powers. These would not be enough. In fact, they themselves are in need of a deeper and higher principle. We actually have a yearning for God, except that that yearning oftentimes gets muffled by our earthly concerns.

We may not exactly know the scope and limits of our capabilities, but it’s good that with trust in God, we launch out into the world and into the future and the many challenges around, with extreme sense of confidence and optimism.

In a sense, we ought to have a kind of entrepreneurial spirit, willing to break new grounds in our earthly life and condition, but always aware that we are doing everything with God and for God.

This is the way to make things moving, to effect drastic changes and necessary transformation of persons and societies, and to become knowing and willing instruments of God in his providence over us and over all creation.

We need to have trust in God, because without him, then we would end up trusting in something else or merely in ourselves, and that would be wrong. We should not be afraid that such trust would take away our sense of freedom and initiative and self-reliance.

Rather, our trust in God will enhance to the maximum our sense of duty, because God himself will tell us so. Precisely the parable of a man giving his servants money and asking them to do business with the money is about this.

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