Reflections
Linking with reality
There are many ways to link with reality, which has several layers. We can use our senses to look around, hear, feel the many sensibly perceptible things around--color, shape, smell, taste, weight, location, posture, etc.
Or we can study, think and reason out, and plunge into the world of ideas, concepts, judgments and arguments to come out with true conclusions and other discoveries, or at least educated opinions and theories.
This is an exhilarating exercise that leads us to an infinity of possibilities. And this can be so systematically done as to be scientific and develop a complex yet unified body of knowledge, helpful to us.
There is one way to link with reality that we should try to be more aware of, or better still, that we should develop and pursue. This is prayer, where one with faith converses with God in a father-and-son relationship.
Prayer takes the business of linking with reality to the higher level. This is because it links us to reality not simply by using our own resources--our senses and intelligence--but by seeing at reality not with us alone, but together with God, the creator of reality.
Of course, prayer requires faith. Faith is God's gift enabling us to plumb the abysmal depth of reality, way beyond what our senses and intelligence can discern and discover.
What prayer does is to take advantage of whatever our senses and intelligence can gather, but it goes beyond them. It does not suppress them, but rather integrates them and uses them to launch to the supernatural order, the ultimate dimension of our reality.
It's a pity that many do not realize this power of prayer. Worse, many of us ridicule it, branding it as useless, irrelevant, and in fact, as something that detaches us from reality.
This is a bias, sadly common and firmly embedded in cultures, that we have to remove from our system. It shrinks our world and reduces the scope of our knowledge.
With our senses alone, we only get sensible knowledge, shutting anything spiritual. With our intelligence alone, we only capture some spiritual reality, but often miss the supernatural.
With our senses alone, we get to depend solely on our temperament, emotions, moods, hormones. With our intelligence alone, we keep ourselves only in the level of philosophy at best, or sociology, or the sciences. We enclose ourselves in the world of the empirical.
Without prayer, we easily succumb to activism, sentimentalism, or intellectualism. We lose the supernatural tone of our thoughts and desires. We tend to be selfish, ignoring the demands of justice and the common good.
Prayer allows us to come up with arguments infused by faith to understand and explain things to ourselves and others. That's why it is very important that we pray, because otherwise we would just saying purely human and natural things.
When knowledge is pursued outside of prayer, it tends to become self-righteous or knowledge prone to bitterness. It's a knowledge that is hostile to the value of sacrifice, need for ascetical struggle, development of virtues.
It would be knowledge that could not understand the importance of charity and justice, and incapable of incorporating the value of mercy. It would be susceptible to vanity and pride, never understanding the relevance of humility.
When one simply relies on his feelings and intelligence, without the faith, he is not likely to tackle the question of the morality of his acts. He is simply interested in what is popular, practical, effective in a certain sense, but not what is moral.
We have to convince ourselves that it is only through prayer that we enter into a deeper reality, a reality both spiritual and supernatural, a reality that cannot be penetrated by our senses alone, or our intelligence alone.
We therefore have to feel the need to learn to pray. The effort is all worthwhile. And it is in the nature of prayer to demand a continuing effort. Prayer, while it can have set rules, always goes by the pace of God, of his grace, which can call for different ways of praying.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)