The struggle to experience God all day
This may sound a bit strange, even presumptuous. But actually, if we do our math, all this talk about faith and religion, all this theologizing and pastoralizing, the recourse to the sacraments and devotions, should redound to nothing other than our experiencing God all day long.
We should not limit ourselves to proclaiming our faith. We have to live it and give witness to it, not only from time to time, but all the time. This is the challenge we have everyday, and we just have to learn how to handle it with God’s grace and with all that we have got.
We have to break free from the current culture, mentalities and lifestyles around that tend to freeze religion into mere formalistic ways. We need to give life to it, a continuous supply of fresh warm blood, so that the fullness of our faith and religion would really come to play as we grapple with life moment to moment.
That abiding and living union with God should be there with us all the time, obviously done with naturalness but never watering it down. It’s an ever exciting affair that can launch us to a joint divine-human adventure, giving us surprises and precious lessons in its creative itinerary.
Our problem is that we tend to lose steam in our fervency, and sooner or later settle to a state of spiritual lukewarmness and complacency. While that is understandable, given our fragile human condition, we have to understand also that precisely that condition is a challenge to be faced with ever growing faith.
We cannot and should not get stuck at a certain level of spiritual growth, no matter how high it may already be. Our relationship with God needs to be worked on all the time, giving it impulses and stimuli for it to move on and grow.
That’s God’s will. Christ said, “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind.” (Mt 22,37) And he reassured us: “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (Mt 28,20)
Thus, we are not inventing things here, building our own religious fantasy. We are simply trying, as we should, to correspond to God’s will and the utter reality of our life.
Obviously, a spiritual and ascetical plan, program or system would be most welcome to support and sustain this living union with God. This is what the saints and many holy men and women down the ages have done.
These days, one should readily understand the importance of such programs. Even among the young ones who now work with computers, they are continually concerned with installing new, updated computer programs so they can do more and better. In our spiritual life, something similar should be felt.
We need to stay away from the constant temptation to turn religion into just a routine set of practices and behavior. The clergy, religious men and women and seminarians are usually vulnerable to this temptation. We need to shake it off and really do everything to make us truly experience God.
For this, we have to see to it that the training in the seminary, for example, helps those young students develop a vital relationship with God. While the academic and other co- and extra-curricular items are important, all of it should lead the seminarians to have a living experience with God.
But everyone needs to be helped to learn to have this living experience of God all day. What is important is that we help all to develop the habit of always praying, getting to relate their life to the different mysteries of Christ’s life, and vice-versa.
This is what contemplative life in the middle of the world means. There’s a conduit between contemplation and action. Contact with God translates into greater contact with others. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be contemplating properly nor acting properly.
This obviously involves exercising as fully as possible one’s faith. This definitely involves but transcends the full use of our senses, our memory and imagination, our desires and feelings, our intelligence and will. We have to go deeper into ourselves to discover that space where we share our life with God.
There is such a space. We may call it our heart, our conscience, whatever, but it’s where we are with God. We may need to purify ourselves, go against the usual tendencies of our human powers, but we have to get there to experience God all day.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City, Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
