Shifting the center of gravity
We need to bring this issue out. It’s so important it can require some drastic action, a sea change in our mentality that can involve a shifting of the center of gravity of our attitudes toward something basic in our life.
For this, let’s use some words of St. Paul in his first letter to Timothy as the cue. We need to be familiar with these words, and in fact to act on them. Here they go:
“If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to that doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing, but sick about questions and strifes of words, from which arise envies, contentions, blasphemies, evil suspicions, conflicts…” (3-5)
Though these words were spoken in the context of particular issue and directly to Christian disciples, I believe they do possess a universal applicability. They simply point to the fact that the ultimate and constant source of knowledge should be our faith, and not just our own ideas, no matter how well derived they are.
Take note that St. Paul went to the extent of equating not following “the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and to that doctrine which is according to godliness” with knowing nothing. In short, we can only say we truly know when we in effect follow the faith.
This is because all truths come from God and belong to God. The only things that do not come and belong to him are the lies and the sins, though God also knows them.
It would not be proper for us to think and, worse, to have the attitude that there are certain facts and truths that are purely our own, or are so of this world that God would have nothing to do with them.
Even our sciences—the math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.—come from God, and therefore have to be used always in accordance to the mind and will of God, and not just at our own exclusive designs and purposes. The least thing we can do is to offer them to God and to thank him every time we use them. We just cannot forget God at all.
This abiding effort to relate things to God is crucial because as St. Paul said, if we fail to do that, then the bad consequences come—envies, quarrels, blasphemies, conflicts, etc. That we are seeing these things today all over the place can only mean that we are not grounding our knowledge and its use on God.
Thus, we are prone to simply use them for our own selfish ends. And we cannot avoid losing the sense of the common good and the need to give glory to God. Instead we tend to give glory to ourselves. We do the opposite of what St. John the Baptist said of himself: “That he must increase, and that I must decrease.” (Jn 3,30)
Besides, that kind of mentality will always lead us to misuse and abuse things. It’s precisely the germ of the Tower-of-Babel syndrome, where man’s pride can only cause division and conflicts.
We need to change our frame of mind, to have a paradigm shift. From being reason-and-emotion-centered, we have to be faith-centered. From being man or self-centered, we need to be God-centered in our thoughts and our behavior.
We have to constantly remind ourselves—and quite strongly especially at the beginning stage—that everything that we know and discover and use actually comes from God and has to be used for God’s glory. This is the proper way to behave and to live.
For this, we have to learn to pray and to immerse our thoughts and even our feelings in God, until we develop a sense of the spiritual and the supernatural, even while fully engaged in our earthly affairs.
As St. Paul recommended: “If you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above…Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth.” (Col 3,1-2)
In short, we have to relate all our earthly affairs to God’s will. We should try to avoid being short-sighted and narrow-minded, our thoughts and desires mainly earth-and-time-bound.
In this, there are no excuses and dispensations. We just have to learn how to pray, spending time trying to develop an intimate relationship with God. We need to find the link between God and our things. That link is there always.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
