Fr. Roy Cimagala
THE secret is to follow Christ. He himself said so. “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, carry the cross and follow me.” (Mt 16,24) We need to be most familiar with this very useful formula in our life and try our best to live by it.
The self-denial asked by Christ is not of the kind that leads us to our self-annihilation. Far from it. It will rather lead us to our self-fulfillment. It is asking that instead of our own selves, we should have Christ as the center of our attention always, the very core and substance of our consciousness. We need, of course, to exercise our faith to live by this divine indication.
And the reason is simple. Christ is the very pattern of our humanity in its original state and the redeemer of our damaged humanity. It’s him in whom we can have our ultimate fulfillment, our true and lasting joy and peace. That’s why Christ said he is “the way, the truth and the life” for us. We cannot go to God, our Father and creator, except through him.
We have to be wary of certain ideologies, cultures and lifestyles that tend to replace Christ as the cause of our self-fulfillment. Sad to say, these appear to be proliferating these days. We have to learn to do battle with them.
The self-denial asked by Christ will obviously require a lot of effort and sacrifice. That’s because we have to contend with our tremendous tendency to stick to our own selves—our own ideas, desires, ambitions, etc. Besides, this tendency is constantly reinforced now by the many allurements of the world, not to mention, the tricks and wiles of the devil himself.
But again, we can be sure that all this effort and sacrifice is all worth it. We need to do everything to wean ourselves from our own selves and start to rely on Christ completely. That absolute reliance on Christ does not annihilate us. It will simply bring us to our most perfect and ideal state. We should have no doubts or qualms in pursuing that ideal.
With Christ, we would know how to use our powers and faculties properly. We would have a clear idea of the real and ultimate purpose of our life here on earth. With him, we somehow would know how to cope with all the possible situations we can have here, including our problems, mistakes and failures.
The self-denial asked by Christ does not remove our involvement and engagement in our earthly and temporal affairs. It simply puts them in the right context and the right direction. We cannot deny that especially these days, we are exposed to many and complicated distracting elements which we have to learn to handle.
The self-denial asked by Christ frees us from unnecessary baggage. It improves our vision and understanding of things, and predisposes our heart to the real love which can only be a sharing in God’s love and, therefore, our true fulfillment.
We therefore should not have superfluous things, creating needs that are really not needs, and thereby generating attachments that can be a hindrance in one’s relation with God and with others.
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ETERNITY-READY. The other day, a very accomplished businessman talked to me about preparing the students of CITE to be futureeady. I was intrigued by that expression, though I immediately got what he meant. And a thought started to stir my mind.
Indeed, we have to prepare the young ones for the many exciting developments, challenges and opportunities that we can expect in the future. At the rate things are going now, the future should be very exciting! Thanks to God, we already have a good glimpse of how things will be a few years from now.
We need to equip the young ones with the proper training and the relevant skills which should not be in the technical level alone. At the moment, we can expect the future to be more complex, requiring a greater maturity in the people, greater grasp of interdisciplinary sciences, etc.
It’s amazing that many of the youngsters, especially those coming from the low-income families, actually carry a heavy baggage of problems, emotional, psychological, social. They appear to be victims of all kinds of unresolved problems in the family and society in general.
Many find it hard, for example, to relate with others in a meaningful and stable way. They tend to revolve around the superficial level. It’s quite obvious that many do not have the basic virtues of hope and patience, fortitude and prudence, temperance and order. It’s indeed a tall order to tackle all these challenges, given the limited time we can spend with them.
But these issues just have to be faced. They need to be resolved properly because these will just clamp these young people down in their pursuit for a successful and happy life. These youngsters really need to be accompanied and mentored, their talents and potentials identified and developed. They need to be stably motivated, until they can become self-propelled.
It’s very moving to note that many of these students actually have great hidden talents that need to be developed. They are actually a rich ore that need to be refined and polished. But they often have very low self-esteem precisely because of the load of problems they carry. This is where the concern for motivating them has to begin.
That is why I often tell them to strengthen their belief in God as the common father of all of us, irrespective of whether one is rich or poor. Once they get it, then they can start discovering the many other wonderful truths about themselves that are useful for their own development. They would know which things to pay attention to and which to ignore.
They would know what is of absolute value and what only has relative value. They would have a more global picture of life in general, aware always of the ever-abiding providence of God. This would inject in them a lot of optimism in spite of the difficulties, challenges and possible mistakes of the present.
In this regard, it is important that these youngsters know how to pray, how to strengthen their faith, hope and charity, how to relate everything in their earthly life to the ultimate eternal life.
They have to be eternityeady, not just futureeady, with the figurative go-bag always by their side.
This is not going to be an easy job. But it can be done.
In fact, it has to be done, no matter what the cost!
E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com
