Leveling up

Fr. Roy Cimagala

THERE’S no other way but to level up. With all the new developments exploding in the world today, we are faced with new challenges as well as opportunities, and we just have to be properly equipped to tackle them.

The technical aspects alone of these developments are formidable enough. They require nothing less than tremendous energy from us. But the fundamental spiritual requirements are even more formidable. We should not only worry about the software. We need to give due attention to the hardware.

We can never outgrow what Christ said: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Mt 6,33) This gives us the proper sense of priority, otherwise we would just get lost.

Remember what Christ again said: “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mk 8,36) We need to be firmly convinced that with God first, all the other things in the world would come in their proper order.

Of course, there is a learning curve involved here. We just have to be game enough to go through it, like having an adventure. We should not mind so much the effort to be exerted, and the ups and downs, the trials and errors we can expect. We just have to remain focused on what we are supposed to do in the face of all these new developments.

For one thing, we have to learn how to discipline ourselves and deepen our virtue of order. It cannot be denied that we can easily get distracted, overdo certain things at the expense of more important duties we have. We can get carried away by the excitement of the moment and forget the bigger picture of things.

For example, we now have a lot of people plunged in social media, spending hours and hours there, even forgetting their meals. While the social media definitely serve a good purpose, it should not undermine the need for us to have direct personal contact with people. We have to learn how to properly blend personal contact with automation.

Our cellphones, if not used prudently, can harm family life and other relations we have. Imagine a family dinner with all the members quiet because everyone is tinkering with his cellphone. This unfortunately is becoming a common sight.

And the idea of rest is fast getting distorted. For many people now, rest simply means to do nothing, to be idle and to go into some man cave to indulge oneself in purely selfish pleasures.

Rest is not meant to cut us off from God and from others. It simply means a change of place, of activity, of pace and rhythm, where we can recover our energies and reignite our passion for God and for others. Remember Christ saying, “Come to me and I will give you rest.” It’s like a farmland that is not for a while planted with things so as to allow it to fallow and recover its natural elements.

We can read books to expand our knowledge of things, study the new techniques offered by the new technologies, and go to deeper meditations to get to know and love God and others better. This is how we ought to level up. The secret, I think, is to leverage the new things while keeping tab on the limits we have to respect. This is prudence.

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Willful but not voluntaristic. Yes, we have to make full use of our faculties, especially the will, but we need to see to it that our will is properly grounded, inspired and oriented. Yes, we have to be willful as much as we can, but seeing to it that our will is inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Otherwise, we may simply become voluntaristic, that is, using our will simply on our own, guided only by our own reasoning and even by our own feelings alone.

That we have to make full use of our will can be gleaned from the words of Christ who told us what the greatest commandment is for us. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Mt 22,37) Of course, loving is a matter of our will that has to deploy all the other faculties we have—our heart, our soul, our mind.

But we need to understand that we can only love properly if that will of ours that we use for loving is inspired by God who in the Holy Spirit provides us with the source, the pattern and the power of loving. That’s because, as St. John tells us, God is the love, his very essence is love. (cfr. 1 Jn 4,8)

Outside of God, when we simply rely on our idea of loving that can only be based on some passing and perishable element, we can only have an illusion of love, a fake love that can mesmerize us for a while but will not last long and cannot tackle all the trials and challenges of our earthly life.

We have to make sure that our will as the engine of our loving is fully inspired by the Holy Spirit who makes God’s love present in us. Loving in the Holy Spirit fulfills what St. Paul said in his Letter to the Ephesians, that is, that we have to “speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ.” (4,15)

It is the Holy Spirit who brings us to the whole truth, who will provide us for all our needs, especially in our difficulties.

He will be the one who reassures us that it is all worthwhile to suffer the unavoidable evils in this world and to find peace and joy even as we swim and float on the vast ocean of mysteries in our earthly life.

This he does by giving us his gifts and fruits that would enable us to handle any possible situation we can find ourselves in, whether it be good or bad. It would be good if we examine ourselves frequently if we are still vitally connected with him, primarily through our will. And this is not fantasizing on our part. The Holy Spirit is our constant and infallible prompter who guides us every step of our way.

We have to be wary when we allow ourselves to be carried away by mere human impulses and worldly trends. We have to be properly guarded against this tendency that is quite common and strong, and even irresistible.

When our will is conformed to the Holy Spirit, our passions can be both fiery and tender, intense and delicate.

E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com