.jpg)
By Fr. Roy Cimagala
Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
THIS is the unmistakable mark of true love, one that channels the very love of God of whom we are his image and likeness, meant to share in his very life and nature. Irrespective of how things go in our life, whether they are going up or down in human terms, as long as we have that true love, the taste of love will always be sweet.
And the basis for this assertion is the truth of our faith that defines true love not only in human terms but also and most especially in spiritual and supernatural terms. True love is not only natural, subject only to the laws of nature which cannot help, given our wounded condition due to our sin, to bear the baggage of the infranatural.
This spiritual and supernatural love can transcend whatever temporal condition we might be in. As St. Paul once said, this kind of love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor 13,7) And given the current conditions in the world, we truly need this love to survive all the trials and challenges in our life.
The challenge we have here is how to have this kind of love and how to keep it going all day and all the time. For this, we should always find ways of how to keep going our relationship with God who is the very essence, source and power of love.
Let’s remember that when God created man, he entered into a personal relationship with us precisely because we have been created by him to be his image and likeness, to be a person, and not just a thing, a plant or animal, with whom we can share his very life and nature.
As we often hear, we, among God’s creatures, are not just something. We are a someone, a person, with intelligence and will. It is with us, together with the angels, that God establishes a personal relationship. We have to learn how to do our part in corresponding to this God-initiated relationship.
For our part, we should just find ways of how we can keep that relationship alive and vibrant, able to feel the reassuring will and ways of God. Only then can we manage the sweetness of love despite the varying conditions and situations of our life here on earth.
We should come up with the appropriate strategy to deal with this condition of our life, some kind of structure or system that can guide us irrespective of the changing circumstances of our daily life. This structure or system should be made up of some practices of piety that would keep our spiritual and supernatural bearing intact as we navigate the seas and oceans of our life.
These practices of piety should be the basic ones like a time for prayer, recourse to the sacraments especially the holy eucharist and confession, some devotions like the praying of the holy rosary, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and other practices like regular examinations of conscience, presence of God all throughout the day making use of human devices, etc.,
Everyday, we have to tweak this system to adapt it to the peculiar conditions of the day. In this regard, it is also good to consider our concrete physical, emotional and mental conditions, so we would somehow know what to do when their strong and weak points would impact on the different events of the day. Not all days are the same. There are what we call ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days.
