Keeping a purposive life
By Fr. Roy Cimagala Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
THAT’S what we should maintain in life. We need to develop a keen sense of the purpose of our life and keep it in play in every circumstance and situation of our life. Difficult? For sure. But we can always train ourselves for it.
We are reminded of this fact of life as we approach the end of the liturgical year which somehow signifies the end of life and the end of things in general. Thus, the gospel reading of the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time tells us of some signs of the end times and of the second coming of Christ who will judge us. (cfr. Mk 13,24-32)
Keeping a purposive life helps us to be realistic and to have a global picture of things, extricating us from our tendency to be easily trapped in some narrow and shallow understanding of our earthly life.
Especially these days when we are enjoying a flowering of technological developments that can easily put us into some silo or filter bubble, we need to have a higher sense of purpose.
Thing is we need to have a higher sense of purpose to truly make use of these technological marvels. I’m afraid that without this clear sense of purpose, more elevated than the usual practical level, we would end up wallowing more deeply in our own world, increasingly insensitive to the ultimate dimension of our life, which is spiritual, moral and supernatural.
In fact, this wallowing phenomenon is what we are seeing these days in the electronic world. What begins as humanly valid practical uses sooner or later deteriorates into inhuman, sinful modes if not animated properly by spiritual and moral values.
There are now a lot of inanities circulated around electronically. Subtle and even open forms of human moral anomalies like vanity, envy, sensuality, greed, egoism, etc., are having a field day in this arena.
These dangers can start with people, especially the young ones, to waste a lot of time and to express and cultivate their youthful weaknesses with nuclear dynamics.
I remember reading an article about the Google CEO warning that young people should be allowed to change their names after some time because they would already have compromised their future with the irresponsible things they have posted on the net. Their cyber past would just be too hot to handle. And with the AI, things can get really bad.
Some great effort is definitely needed here, since first of all, we have to break that deep-seated prejudice against religion when we engage in our earthly, mundane affairs. If we ever talk about religion, we seem to confine it only inside churches and places like those, but not in our secular concerns.
Our sense of naturalness seems to be twisted at the root, since it seems to be incompatible with anything spiritual and supernatural. We need to correct this irregularity, without going to the extreme of behaving in some strange, unnatural way.
A higher and abiding sense of purpose can help us do this. It will enable us to have a sense of unity and continuity among the different elements and the different events in our life, be they good or bad, favorable or unfavorable to us, etc.
When we have love of God as our abiding sense of purpose in our life, we would find it easy to go from one thing to another, no matter disparate they are from each other. We would find meaning in everything, including what we consider to be human disasters in our life.