Letting go and moving on

Fr. Roy Cimagala .

WE have to learn this art of letting go and moving on.

Especially these days, when we are bombarded with so many competing things and the possibility of getting cornered by some problem or difficulty is very high, we need to know how to let go and move on.

We have to realize that there are some predicaments that we cannot anymore resolve or overcome, at least, humanly speaking. But if we have trust in God’s providence, we should be convinced that there is no point getting stuck and entangled in them for so long that we cannot do anything else.

We just have to let go and move on with our life which continues to offer us more challenges to face, more goals to reach. In this, it pays also if we know how not to get too emotional or too psychologically affected by the twists and turns of our life, the possible consequences of failure and frustrations, etc.

We should learn how to discipline our emotions and psychological dynamic. It is good if we know how to be cool, sport and game, and avoid getting easily nervous and tense. Let’s remember that our physical, emotional and psychological make-up can only take so much burden. Beyond that, we break down.

It also helps that we know how to regularly purify our memory and train our imagination to tread on the positive, constructive and encouraging path, rather than on the negative, destructive and discouraging one.

Let’s remember that it is in our spiritual selves, always open and receptive to God’s grace, that can take on anything. It’s in our spiritual life that we should take utmost care of, since it is the one that enables us go beyond what our physical, emotional and psychological constitution can manage.

If properly nourished by faith, hope and charity and the many other human virtues, our spiritual life can see a picture much bigger than what our physical, emotional and psychological selves can see. It can tackle anything!

It is in our spiritual life where we can always feel reassured that everything would just be all right, because as St. Paul would put, “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8,28) We should never forget these reassuring words of St. Paul.

We have to learn to live a proper and healthy sense of abandonment which is not at all a case of negligence or an I-don’t-care attitude. We have to be completely responsible for everything in our life, although we know that life has a lot more to offer and to challenge us than what we can handle. There are mysteries to tackle and humanly impossible predicaments to bear, and we just have to know how to live with them.

Christ told us not to worry about anything because he knows how to derive good even from evil. If we strive to assume the mind and the very life of God, then we can also have this worry-free attitude, and would know how to let go of certain difficulties and move on to the many other things that our life will ask us to get involved.

Let’s remember that while we have to be 100 percent responsible for our life, God is also 100 percent responsible for it. Everything is actually in God’s hands. Our 100 percent  should be united to the 100 percent of God.

We should just focus on doing what is good, on following what we know is the will of God for us. We actually cannot afford to waste time and to get stranded in some corner. There are so many things to do, many people to reach out to, many problems to resolve, many places to go, etc.

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Though there is a distinction between our body and our spiritual soul, we always have to remember that these two are both constitutive of our being. They are meant to be together. We are neither body alone nor soul alone. We are at once body and soul.

There might be some separation of the two at our death, but then at the end of time, our faith tells us that there will be a resurrection of the body and the reunification of it with the soul. In heaven or in hell, in our definitive state of life in eternity, we will be both body and soul. In this life, they are like friends that cannot get together often, and enemies that cannot separate from each other.

That there is distinction between the body and soul is quite obvious. In fact, not only is there distinction, but also conflict, as testified by St. Paul when he said, “In my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” (Rom 7,22-23)

But in spite of that distinction and conflict, they are meant to be united. This is how our Catechism teaches us about this point: “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body, i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.” (CCC 365)

These clarifications are significant for they would show us that somehow the condition of the body is determined to some extent by the condition of the soul, and vice versa. There is some kind of correlation between the two, though not in a strictly one-to-one mathematical kind of correlation.

To put it bluntly, we cannot say that just because one has an ugly face or a frail body, he too has an ugly soul or a weak soul. That is absolutely foul. In the lives of saints and holy men and women, we can see a beautiful soul in ugly faces and sickly bodies.

In fact, we have these prophetic words from the Book of Isaiah that described the future Christ: “He had no stately form or majesty to attract us, no beauty that we should desire him.” (53,2)

So we have to be careful with making judgments based on looks alone and other external things. Just the same, we have to say that when the body is sick, especially of the mental, emotional, psychological kind, we cannot say that the illness is due exclusively to some organic malfunction. The condition of the soul has something to do with it also.

In these illnesses, we can say that the person has his soul not totally identified with God, with Christ in the Holy Spirit, because if he is, he would know what to do with those illnesses in terms of how to avoid, handle and overcome them.

These illnesses should not just be managed by using drugs alone and other human and material means. The recourse to spiritual and supernatural means to recover full union with God is also necessary. When the soul is not with God, then it is with the devil completely or partially.

Thus, when attending to our ailments and those of the others, we should not forget to have recourse also to the spiritual and supernatural means which, in fact, are more important and indispensable than the drugs and other medical interventions that we also need.We have to liberate ourselves from the mindset that our sicknesses and illnesses are purely bodily affairs with no spiritual and supernatural dimensions involved.

E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com