By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
WE should not be surprised that as we end the liturgical
year, the readings of the Mass these days focus on the end times. They
are not meant to scare us but rather to encourage us to be properly
prepared and to really lock our attention on what are truly essential
in our life. This is when we have to make what we can refer to as some
eschatological considerations.
We have to examine ourselves on how prepared we are to meet
our death, which some saints have affectionately called as “Sister
Death,” because if we go by our Christian faith, death is actually
just a transition from our earthly life of being created and redeemed
by God to our definitive eternal life with God who wants to share his
life with us, we being his image and likeness, his children.
Talking about proper preparation, we have to realize that this is none
other our spiritual preparedness. It is what gives us the full picture
of our life and destiny, opening ourselves to a supernatural life with
God. We are no mere creatures of nature. We have been made in the
image and likeness of God, elevated to be children of his in Christ.
Our spiritual preparedness takes us to a higher ground,
giving us a glimpse of what is beyond our human horizons and natural
limits. This is not to mention the corrections it will make to our
inadequate if not erroneous understanding of our life here on earth.
It affords us an apocalyptic worldview, because it unveils
and reveals, which is what apocalypse means, the true meaning and
purpose of our life. In other words, with this kind of preparedness,
anything can happen in the world, and we can still manage to come out
safe and sound, in the ultimate sense of the words.
As a consequence of pursuing our spiritual preparation, we
need to learn how we can relate our earthly and temporal concerns to
our ultimate spiritual and supernatural goal. In short, we have to
know how to connect time with eternity.
We have to overcome our narrow-mindedness or blindness with
respect to the spiritual and supernatural goal of our life, because no
matter how much we ignore it, we cannot deny the fact that the full
dimensions of our life go beyond the temporal, the material and
natural. We are also meant for the eternal, spiritual and
supernatural.
And the way to do that is simply to live as fully as
possible, in the richness of their practical implications, those
divine gifts of faith, hope and charity. All the other human virtues
and values that we pursue in our life here on earth should be animated
by these theological virtues.
It is through these gifts of faith, hope and charity that we
get connected with God who actually always intervenes in our life
since he is still creating and redeeming us. We are still a work in
progress. We are not yet a finished product. Our correspondence to
God’s abiding interventions in our life is through these virtues of
faith, hope and charity. This is how we can connect our time with the
eternity of God.
The fact that we can think and reason out, wish and desire,
choose or not, love or not, are clear indications that we are not
meant only for the here and now, the tangible and the worldly. We go
beyond them.
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
