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By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE should be experts in discerning the spirit that animates us. Our life principle is our soul which is spiritual. As such, we need to know the kind of spirit that animates our soul that in turn animates our whole life.

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We have to realize that there are many kinds of spirits roaming around the world, and we have to learn how to discern them. There is the spirit of God, the spirit of Christ as opposed to the antichrist. There is also the evil spirit, and the spirit of the world that is dominated by the evil one, and the spirit of the flesh.

St. John was explicit as to which spirit is proper to us. “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.” (1 Jn 4,2-3)

St. Paul distinguished between the fruits of the Spirit of God and the works of the flesh dominated by the evil spirit. The former include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (cfr Gal 5,22-23)

The latter include fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing. (cfr Gal 5,19-21)

We would somehow know the kind of spirit we have by the kind of thoughts, desires and loves we have. If we look more closely at how our consciousness works, what its usual contents are, what we are most aware of, we would have an idea of the kind of spirit we have. All we have to do is to see if our thoughts, desires and loves are those of the fruits of the spirit or the fruits of the flesh.

This is also true when we examine the kind of dreams we have in our sleep where we are supposed to be unconscious. Our state of unconsciousness is when we disengage ourselves for a while from our bodily mechanisms, but it is in that state where our spirit takes over, so to speak. In a sense, it’s when we are unconscious that the kind of spirit we have can be known.

We know, of course, that with our wounded, sinful human condition at present, our spirit is not yet totally that of the spirit of God. In fact, it may somehow be dominated by the spirit of the flesh, of the world, if not, God forbid, of the devil itself.

That is why we need to struggle. The ascetical struggle is a constant feature in our earthly life which will always be an arena between the forces of good and evil. We have to get used to this fact of life and train ourselves adequately for it.

To be sure, God will always be on our side. Even if we are lost, God will always seek us out, as dramatized in those parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. We just have to try our best to correspond to God’s constant interventions and solicitude over us.

The important thing to remember is that we should try our best that the spirit that should animate us is the spirit of God, and not any other spirit. We cannot therefore underestimate the need for us to be always on guard. Let’s remember that we are favorite targets of the enemies of God since we have been created in his image and likeness.

It would be good if we are transparent about this business of identifying the kind of spirit we have at the moment. Through constant examinations of conscience, through spiritual direction and other spiritual means, we would know the kind of spirit we have.

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Why do we suffer? The quick and short answer to that question is because we are not with God, from whom all good things come. We prefer to be on our own, even to make ourselves our own God. Of course, separated from God, from whom, to repeat, all good things come, the only thing that can happen to us is to suffer.

Not only do we suffer, but we neither cannot help but also die, which is a consequence of our sin, a contradiction to what being with God, who is life eternal, would entitle us. With God, we can only have joy, bliss and everything that is good. Without him, we can only have the opposite.

Suffering is not intended for us in the beginning, nor in the end, in our final state of life in heaven. But we brought suffering to ourselves by disobeying God, by daring to separate ourselves from God. That’s why, we suffer now. We cannot avoid it anymore.

Remember that our first parents, still in the state of original justice, did not know any suffering or pain. They were meant to be immortal, to enjoy what is known as impassibility (the capacity not to suffer any pain, even tiredness) and integrity, the state of being in harmony with their own selves and with everything else.

But all that was lost because they disobeyed God’s commandment to them and preferred to do their own will. They preferred to separate themselves from God, thinking that they can be their own God. That was the seemingly irresistible temptation the devil, the father of all lies, hoisted on them.

But in spite of all that, God continues to love us. He is such a father to us that even our sins and our stupidities would make him love us some more. This he did by sending his Son to us to save us. Let’s try to imagine what all this divine endeavor would involve.

The Son had to become man to tackle the whole problem of our sinfulness that unavoidably leads us to suffering and eventually to death. We can just imagine the kind of “suffering” God had to undergo to save us!

In the words of St. Paul, the Son of God emptied himself to become man, and he emptied himself further by suffering death for our sake, and death on the cross. Let us try to go through his passion and death to have a good idea of what Christ our redeemer had to undergo to save us.

The suffering and death of Christ which was the price, the ransom for our redemption, is the paradigm we have to follow to heal ourselves of our strong tendency to be by own selves alone, daring to separate ourselves from God. Christ has converted suffering and death into a means to our salvation.

This time, our suffering as long as it is united to the suffering of Christ, becomes the cure that heals us of our fundamental infirmity to separate ourselves from God. Our suffering now can have a redemptive value. It is something that we should welcome and even look for. Without suffering, we cannot help but stay away from God.

That is why not only do we suffer now, which is unavoidable, but we also have to suffer, to look for it, because only through suffering can we be reconciled with God, from whom we come and to whom we belong in a most intimate way since God wants us to be his image and likeness, to be children of his.

We need to readjust our understanding of suffering to conform it to how Christ wants our suffering to be. Every suffering we experience in this life should be an invitation to “deny ourselves,” to empty ourselves, so we can be with God, and in fact, be “another Christ,” who is the pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

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