Fr. Roy Cimagala .
THIS is again one of the paradoxes in Christian life. These paradoxes are unavoidable since we have to deal with the many conflicts and oppositions we have within ourselves and among ourselves, not to mention the tension among the different dimensions and aspects of our earthly life—the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, etc.
We have to learn how to be cool with this condition in our life, and avoid falling into unnecessary stress and worries. This is part of the territory. We can handle it perfectly well. We just have to have the right attitudes and skills.
Christ somehow referred to this particular paradox when he said: “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, but whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life…” (Jn 12, 24-25) And he acted it out himself when he finally died on the cross and then resurrected after three days.
It would be good if we keep this paradigm in mind always.
We need to die in order to have eternal life with God. And this can happen if we die with Christ, that is, with faith, hope and charity, because only then can we share also in the resurrection of Christ.
St. Paul said as much: “If we have been united with him (Christ) in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” (Rom 6,5-8)
We have to find ways to die a little everyday so that little by little also we can achieve a certain degree of the life that God meant for us, he who created us to be his image and likeness. We have to avoid simply developing our life purely according to our designs.
We need to chisel out those parts in ourselves that are not in conformity with God’s designs for us—our sins, our defects and weaknesses. We have to render death to our pride, vanity, lust, greed, laziness, etc.
These of course will require a lot of time and effort, but before anything else, we would need nothing less than the grace of God to conquer them or at least to have control over them. And God himself gives us this grace abundantly.
This is what is meant by dying a little every day. We have to pray and make sacrifices, denying ourselves of something, even the legitimate ones, like food and drinks and some means of comfort without compromising our health, spiritual, physical and otherwise.
We have to learn to detach ourselves from earthly things while using them, so that our heart can only be filled with love for God, and with that love, we can love everybody and everything else properly.
We have to see to it that while we die a little everyday according to what is suggested above, there should also be some kind of awareness that we are being purified, liberated from some burden, etc. In other words, while there is some pain, there should also be a corresponding feeling of joy and peace, otherwise our dying would be dying for nothing.
There definitely should be some feeling that we are getting more intimate with God and with all the others, irrespective of how they are to us. This is how we ought to die so as to live the life proper to us.
***
Doubt Christ no more. In the run-up toward the culminating act of his redemptive mission here on earth, Christ finally was quite open about who he really was. That is, that he was the Christ, the expected Redeemer, the son of God who became man for our sake.
And yet in spite of all the miracles and the wonderful teachings he gave them, many of the people continued to be doubtful and even suspicious of him. On several occasions, they even tried to harm and eliminate him. Of course, in the end they got their way. They managed to put Christ to death in the most ignominious way to die, i.e., to be crucified.
It is a phenomenon that continues to take place today, in spite of the most convincing of the miracles of Christ—his own resurrection that later led to his ascension into heaven that was witnessed by a good number of people.
That many of us continue to doubt and even to be suspicious of him can be seen in the fact that we continue to take him for granted, to put him aside from our daily affairs as if he is irrelevant or just a drag to our activities, and even to openly reject and to be hostile to him.
We need to correct this predicament immediately and strongly, otherwise we would be fully cut off from the very source and keeper of our humanity. There are many ways to resolve this problem.
We obviously cannot cover all of them, but we can at least mention a few.
One way is to disabuse ourselves from banking our belief in Christ mainly on some tremendous miracles and extraordinary events.
That would be like testing or doubting God always. We should believe in Christ, with or without miracles.
Christ himself complained about this. “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe,” he said to a court official whose daughter was dying. (Jn 4,48)
We need to keep our faith alive and burning. We should never allow it to cool down. That’s why we should strive to develop a vibrant life of piety that is supported by a concrete plan for which we should not be sparing in our efforts and sacrifices. It cannot be denied that a plan to support our life of faith and piety will always involve a lot of effort and sacrifice.
Things should come to the point when we somehow can see Christ in all the situations of our life, and discern his will for us at any moment. In other words, that we practically make ourselves contemplative souls even the midst of the world.
This is not falling into fantasies. This is, in fact, making ourselves most realistic, because in spite of our limitations, we cannot deny that Christ is in everything and is actually intervening in our life always. This is because being God, Christ is the very foundation of all reality. He is everywhere.
Let us hope that we can have a vivid awareness of the presence of Christ all throughout the day, 24/7, and that we can be drawn always to correspond to his loving and merciful will. We should feel as much as possible God’s continuous love for us, and we should try to repay that love with our love. Let’s never set him aside.
The ideal to aim at is that we get fully conscious of being with Christ all the time, and that it is he who is actually guiding us and showing us the way of how to proceed in any endeavor.
That is why we need to set aside some time for some meditative prayer so as to discern more clearly God’s will and ways.
E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com
