Glimmer in somber November
Despite the gloomy sound and feel of November, what with its widespread commemoration of the dead, there are many bright and sunshiny reasons to be happy in this penultimate month of the year.
November invites us, even challenges us, to think big, to leave behind our small-town outlook, our earth-and-time-bound mentality to consider the ultimate dimensions of our life.
We are meant for heaven, for supernatural and eternal life, for communion with our Father-Creator and among ourselves, etc. We are meant for things that can never be found in our life here on earth, no matter how rich and successful we may be in our endeavors.
We honor these very sublime truths with the celebration of the Solemnity of All Saints on November 1 and the Solemnity of Christ the King on November 23. We are meant to form one family, one kingdom among ourselves with God.
Remember that parable of the rich man with a good harvest? "What shall I do?" he asked himself. "I have no place to store my harvest. I know!" he said. "I will pull down my grain bins and build larger ones…Then I will say to myself: You have blessings in reserve for years to come. Relax! Eat heartily, drink well. Enjoy yourself.
"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life shall be required of you. To whom will all this piled-up wealth of yours go?" That is the way it works with the man who grows rich for himself instead of growing rich in the sight of God." (Lk 12,15-21)
Yes, we are meant to be rich in God's grace. That is the true measure of our dignity. It's not in our possessions. It's not even in our accomplishments, though these have their value. It's in how deeply our heart gets identified with God's will. It's whether we are truly in love, not entangled with love's caricatures.
November challenges us to expand our perspectives so that we can keep an abiding sense of eternity and supernatural life, even while here on earth and immersed in its affairs. We have to learn go beyond the sensible and the sentimental.
November invites us to derive practical lessons from the frequent considerations of the Last Things: death, judgment, hell, heaven. We should lose the fear of making these considerations. They actually complete our vision and understanding of things, and help us to distinguish what is essential in life.
We have to be wary of our tendency to get trapped in a purely earthly outlook. This is the big problem we have. While there's a need to get fully immersed in our worldly affairs, material and temporal, this should not be at the expense of the spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life.
We have to learn to combine both dimensions, just as St. Paul said: "Just as we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly." (1 Cor 15,49) More, even if we get deep in human matters, we ought to keep our conversation in heaven. St. Paul said so in Philippians 3,20.
We have to convince ourselves that this blending and linking between the material and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal, the natural and the supernatural are not only possible and feasible. It is also what is proper to us.
In fact, the need for integration does not stop in those areas alone. It extends to our need to combine our individual and social dimensions. We don't live for ourselves alone. We are meant to live for and with others.
Our social character is not an optional thing. It is an essential part of our being. There is no human perfection unless it is considered in the context of our social nature. We are not only individual persons. We are meant to form one organic family.
The ways to do all these combining processes are all available. We have the capacity, we have the ways. Besides, in the first place, there is also the grace of God that insures the effectiveness of our efforts.
We need to pay more attention to this need. We need to break the barriers of time and space, and the other limitations of our human earthly condition, so we can enter into the real world meant for us.
This is the challenge we have in November. Don't you think it should be an exciting month rather than a somber, gloomy one?
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)