By Fr. Roy Cimagala
Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
Learn to look for Christ always
WE have to train ourselves to look for Christ always, beginning in the little ordinary things of our daily routine. By so doing, we can find him and start to enter into the dynamic of his love for us, which is what is proper to us.
It is important that we always have this desire to look for him because otherwise we will only end up looking for ourselves or something else, and we can only go so far that way. In fact, the most likely thing to happen is for us to find ourselves in some trouble or disaster. Temptations will hound us, and falling into sin would just be a matter of time.
We are reminded of this duty in the parable where Christ compared the Kingdom of God with the man who plants seeds on the land and these seeds would simply grow by themselves, as well as the parable of the mustard seed. (cfr. Mk 4,26-34)
What these parables tell us is that Christ is everywhere and is actually in charge of everything. We are expected to find him and go along with his will and ways, since we are meant to be like him, to be children of God in Christ. He is actually the one who will shape us to be God’s image and likeness as God wants us to be. He is “the way, the truth and the life” for us. He offers us everything we need to be who we ought to be.
We have to be wary of our strong tendency to be carried away and swallowed up by our earthly and temporal affairs because we fail to see in them the occasion, reason and means to find Christ and to live and do things with him.
Our temporal affairs actually have that character since they are under God’s constant governance and providence. Christ is always there showing us the proper way of how to deal with them, especially when we encounter difficulties, trials, challenges, and especially when we are tempted and when we fall into sin.
Obviously, we need faith to find Christ in our earthly affairs. Thus, we have to have that discipline of making many acts of faith during the day, as well as training our human faculties—our intelligence and will, our senses, emotions and passions, our memory and imagination, our appetites, instincts and urges—to have that desire to look and find Christ in everything, starting with the little things.
At the moment, we have to make a strong and constant struggle against our curiosities that are driven only by self-indulgence, by what we consider as pleasurable, profitable, or what feeds and pampers our egos.
Thus, we need to learn to be contemplative even in the middle of the world, able to see God in all the good, the bad, and the ugly that the world contains. We need to learn how to be recollected so that even as we engage our senses and faculties with the many immediate things in life, we don’t lose sight of the ultimate end.
We need to exercise our faith. We cannot depend solely on what we see, hear or feel. Neither would it be enough that we move only when we understand things. We have to follow closely what our faith tells us, even if there are mysteries involved.
God’s providence is such that not only is he present in everything. He is also actively intervening in our life, especially in the little things, drawing us and everything else to himself. We need to see and feel these interventions!