Expect to get dirty

Fr. Roy Cimagala .

IF we have to be practical in this life, exerting effort to attend and resolve all our issues and challenges, not to mention, to be truly being faithful and consistent to the living Christ who continues to be with us in the Holy Spirit, then we need to be tough, creative and flexible, and willing to get dirty without compromising what is essential.

And what is essential is simply to be with Christ who was willing to go through all the mess of our redemption. He was willing not only to get dirty, but also to offer his life on the cross for us.

If we truly follow him, we cannot expect to experience anything less.

He himself said that if we want to follow him, we have to be ready not only to deny ourselves, but also to carry the cross. (cfr. Mt 16,24)

But Christ has reassured us that “in this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (Jn 16,33)

So let’s just strengthen our faith in Christ, enliven our piety, and be sport.

Pope Francis has been warning us that we should be ready to get dirty if we truly want to reach out to those who are far from Christ and his Church, those who are lost, those in the peripheries, those who so far have been neglected or inadequately attended to by the Church.

That Synod on the Amazon that stirred a lot of controversy was one way he was using to tackle that challenge of reaching out. The issues, problems, challenges there are definitely complex and complicated. They just have to be faced, and the Church just has to find new ways since the status quo is clearly not working.

And in this task of finding new ways and new paths, there definitely is great need for discernment of what the Holy Spirit, who guides us all, is telling us. Definitely this is not an easy task.

This is where we can get dirty, where we can be thrown into confusion and even commit some errors. But again, God is on top and is in control. We just have to sharpen our skill of discernment that requires genuine sanctity from us.

We should not be afraid to tackle the pagan practices that can be found in certain parts of the world, and to engage in a dialogue with the different ideologies that can even be openly opposed to Christ and his Church. We have to reach out to everybody the way they are and see what things we can do to bring Christ to them, vice-versa.

What we have to avoid is to ignore them, to be aloof and indifferent to them, and much less, to consign them already to the definitive category of the lost and the hopelessly irredeemable. That would not be Christian.

Let us remember that Christ is alive through the Holy Spirit and continues to redeem us in ways that are appropriate to the circumstances of the times, place and people. While we already have articulated a lot of his will and ways, we can never presume that we have everything already mastered. That would straitjacket Christ into our own ideas and our legalisms, much like what the Pharisees of old did.

There is need for constant discernment, which does not mean that we completely do away with what we already managed to define as God’s will and ways. And to be truly discerning, we should earnestly look for Christ, always asking for the light of the Holy Spirit. In other words, let’s be truly holy, always working on our sanctification, since that’s the only way we can listen clearly what the Holy Spirit is prompting us.

Our problem today is that many people want an easy, fast and fantasy-like trouble-free kind of life, and are afraid even of the word, sanctification.

***

Empathy and intersubjectivity. If we truly want to be genuine friends and brothers and sisters to everybody else, we need to practice empathy first.

Hopefully that gesture will elicit a corresponding similar response of the others toward us, and so we can enter into the world of intersubjectivity which is what loving is all about.

While empathy is a one-way affair, intersubjectivity is already a two-way, mutual affair. Things start with oneself giving himself to the others, and what he gives is also given back to him. As St. John of the Cross would put it, “Where there is no love, put love and you will harvest love.” It’s a principle that works most of the time.

Empathy glues us together as a people, enabling us to enter into one another’s lives as we are supposed to do, building up our sense of unity and solidarity despite the variety of our conditions and situations. And so anything that undermines it undermines us as a people, as a society, as a family.

Lack of it leads to conflicts and acrimony, poisoning and weakening our social fabric. We need to be more aware of building up this important aspect of our lives, knowing its true nature and character, its authentic source of energy and its real goal. At this time, we cannot afford to be naïve about our need for empathy, properly understood.

Our initial problem is that many of us understand empathy more as an instinctive and emotional reaction only, and nothing much else. When you see someone stumble and in pain, you immediately mirror his condition by vicariously feeling the fellow´s predicament yourself.

The emotions, of course, play an important role in developing empathy. We cannot identify ourselves with the others through pure ideas alone, and doctrine, and all that. We have to use the emotions also, as in giving a lot of understanding, affection, compassion, loyalty, etc. Our interest in the spiritual and supernatural should not sacrifice or compromise naturalness where the emotions play an important role.

But neither should empathy be just an instinctive and automatic reaction; it has to be a deliberately cultivated trait. It should not just remain in the emotional level; it also has to be properly directed and driven by our conscious reason, and then by our faith and charity.

It’s this wholistic grasp of empathy that would truly help us build the society that we deserve as persons and as children of God. We need to do everything to attain that understanding and the skill to live it.

Thus, we have to study it not only in the physical, biological and social sciences. It has to be studied also under the light of our faith and religion. Actually, the latter source of knowledge gives empathy its deepest moorings. It defines empathy’s ultimate dimensions. The natural sciences only give us the tools and techniques to develop empathy.

The Christian faith, for example, links empathy to the whole range of Christian charity that includes not only loving those who love us but also those who don’t. It’s this faith where empathy breaks free from its usual confinement in the emotion level to enter into the world of the supernatural to which we are called due to our spiritual nature also.

It’s when we master the art of empathy that we can aspire to create the proper condition for intersubjectivity to take place. This is the ideal condition for all of us. But like any ideal, it is something to be worked out with great effort. It may appear to be utopian at first, but we have to convince ourselves that it can be achieved. We just have to keep on trying.

We have to be wary of our tendency to take things for granted, or to be so swallowed up completely by the usual flow of things we do that we do fail to give some thought on how to grow in empathy and intersubjectivity.

E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com