When good is bad and vice-versa
Or when something true can turn out to be a lie. We need to be aware of these tricks that happen quite often, as in everyday and always.
This is because many of these claims for goodness and truth are not based on God, but rather on someone’s idea of what is good and true. This is never dependable.
With our own ideas alone, we can start playing games to serve our self-interest instead of the common good. And worse things can follow later, as in malice, greed, outright deception. The wiles of the flesh, the world and the devil himself can easily spoil what initially was good.
Or we can start with God, but get lost along the way. There are endless ways we can easily slip from God to our own devices. We have to be wary of our capacity to rationalize and self-justify. That's when evil can camouflage as good, falsehood as truth.
God, not us, is the source and the maker of truth and goodness. We can only receive, reflect and make use of God’s truth and goodness. This has to be said directly because there are many people now who think truth and goodness are just what we make of them.
What we need to do to stick to the truth and goodness up to the end is to continue dealing with God in prayer all throughout the day, knowing how to convert everything into prayer. This can be done. In fact, this should be done. And ways to do it are never lacking.
God is everywhere. Even in our darkest moments, he is there. There’s no point to think God is not accessible. More than the creator, he is a father to us who loves us no end. He will make himself available to us all the time, ever solicitous to our needs.
Remember the Psalms: “Where shall I flee from your face? If I ascend into heaven, you are there. If I descend into hell, you are present. If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall your hand lead me.” (139,7-10)
We just have to find an adequate and constant way of getting in touch with him. For this, we have to ready to go all the way to the cross. That's the final test to see if were still with God or already without him. Woe to us when we dare to separate ourselves from him, and just rely on our own resources.
We can try to live and think always in the presence of God, perhaps making use of human devices to remind us of him all the time. We have to learn the skill of rectifying our intentions many times during the day, since we know how fickle we can be. Our intentions are what direct us to God.
We have to know how to rev up our love for him, never allowing it to fade and die, because as St. Paul told us: ‘To them that love God, all things work together unto good…” (Rom 8,28)
And thus, we also have to know the correlative of this possibility of how something true and good can turn out to be false and bad. That is, it can also happen that something false and bad can turn out to be true and good.
How can this be? In the Catechism, we are told of why God allows evil to come to us. “He permits it, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it.” (CCC 311)
We have to remember that in the play of life, God always intervenes even if it seems he is absent. There’s such thing as providence which is God’s way of bringing all things back to himself. No evil, no matter how big, can stand in the way.
Thus, we read in the Catechism: “From the greatest moral evil ever committed—the rejection and murder of Godś only Son, caused by the sins of all men—God, by his grace that ábounded all the more,’ brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption. But for all that, evil never becomes a good.” (312)
We have to be wary of the different wills at play in our life—Gods, ours and the devils. We have to know how to play our part.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)