Distilling the real fuel for development
It’s now getting clear that with all the developments taking place in the world today, we need to give due attention to our interior, spiritual needs, and not to get entangled and held hostage by the fuss and buzz in the external, material world that now seems to be proliferating, sucking us to its sinkhole.
This can easily happen when gripped by worldly affairs, we fail to think properly, reflect, meditate and pray. This is shown when we fall into forms of activism, when we feel harassed and our life seems to proceed on its own guided only by instincts and passing thoughts and fancies.
We are not saying that to be busy with work or to be immersed in the things of the world is wrong. What is wrong is when these activities are made to compete with our need to take care of our spiritual life – our need to study and strike a continuing conversation with God.
Obviously, the consequences of this anomaly can only be dangerous. With our interior life neglected, we tend to get objectified, depersonalized, alienated from our own selves, from others and from God. And the freefall to graver irregularities begins.
The conflicts, wars, the drift to making a culture of death and sin, with all these legalizations of same-sex union, contraception, abortion, divorce, clearly indicate we have been distancing ourselves from the ultimate source of truth, goodness and love for quite a while already. We seem now to be depending on our own ideas and devices.
We are not purely material beings. In fact, it is our spiritual nature that gives us life, stability, meaning and direction. We need to be wary of our tendency to detach our material side from our spiritual. And this is not a condition that concerns us only individually, or only a few of us. It concerns all of us, and we need to help one another to be true to it always.
The gospel tells us that man does not live by earthly material values alone. We need to be with our God, our Creator and Father. ¨Not by bread alone does man live, but by every word of God.¨ (Lk 4,4) Besides, it was made clear that we ought to adore God alone, and him only shall we serve, and not any other master.
This truth is reiterated when our Lord said: ¨What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul. Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul.¨ (Mt 16,26)
The deeper problem we have now seems to be that we are losing the sense of the spiritual, the conviction that we have a spiritual soul, and not just a vegetative or animal soul that happens to be rational.
Rationality now seems to belong to the sphere of matter and not of the spirit. This is what today´s worldlings – the atheists, agnostics, deists, etc. – are claiming in effect. They want to confine it to worldly and material values.
Thus, rationality is now widely exercised and lived in the context of practicality and of what gives relative advantage to a person. Absolute, eternal truths and life after our death here as befits a spiritual being are thrown out of the window. It is a rationality that is averse to the idea of worshipping God.
If we are to follow this line of thinking, we will see sooner or later that we will end up in an abyss to perdition. Our rationality just cannot remain engaged with material and worldly objects. Unless deliberately frustrated, it will always go to the spiritual and eventually the supernatural world of God.
As to how to be prudent in our behavior in this world of ours now when we seem to be agitated to go material and worldly only at the expense of our interior and spiritual needs, we should strive to correct our human tendencies and train ourselves to focus always on God and because of God, on others, since for us to love God is also to love others.
We need to remind ourselves that we need to love, the love that should only be a participation of the love of God for us, and not any other foolish kinds of love, of which we are fond of inventing. This is the fuel for our genuine human development, individually and socially.
A Church document says: ¨Only love is capable of radically transforming the relationships that men maintain among themselves.¨ It is what leads us to true justice and development.*
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
