Getting back on our feet

WE have been floored by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake. The number of casualties is increasing, and the damage has been extensive in terms of properties and infrastructure.

Houses and buildings have fallen. Landslides have blocked roads, bridges destroyed, isolating towns. But it’s most heartbreaking to see churches collapse or practically ruined. That sight alone touches right deep in people’s soul like no other.

Gone, for now, are those precious treasures that represent our people’s journey of faith and piety through the centuries. Their mere presence, even as we just happen to pass them by, never fails to evoke a certain sense of our identity.

We may not have been a very good member of the Church or one who is consistently faithful to it, but somehow we feel we belong to it, just as any child continues to belong to a family whether he behaves well or not. We are always welcome to enter it. It does not make easy, uncharitable distinctions.

Some of us are asking why these churches have to go the way they did during the temblor. Well, God has his ways, his very mysterious ways. And if we continue to have faith, we know that everything happens for a good reason. “Omnia in bonum,” as they say.

We have to reinforce our belief that God is conveying a beautiful message to us through their disappearance. Obviously we have to try to decipher and fathom it. We can always try.

We should not just focus on the purifying or penalizing aspect of their disappearance, destruction or damage, though that alone holds a good basis. For one, we have often taken them for granted, allowing them to drift to deterioration.

Very often, when I visited many of these old churches, I got the impression that they were treated like aging great-grandmothers who were more of a bother than a useful constituent. They seem to be maintained only as a religious prop or cultural ornament. Their sacramentality as our home with God is practically lost.

This is not to mention that in our life of piety, many things have gone sour. We like to strut our religiosity, yet even in the externals alone, many holes and inconsistencies can be seen. If we are not lax, our most prevalent predicament, then we go to the other extreme of being too fastidious as to be rigid and superstitious.

But I’m sure there is a lot more of positive reasons why these beautiful churches are gone for now. I like to believe that God is challenging us to rebuild our spiritual life so we can rebuild our churches, making them more beautiful, stronger and more adapted to current and foreseeable situations and challenges.

God is asking us to get our act together in both our own personal and collective life. We need to develop a strong and functioning interior life of love of God, and a vibrant concern for the others in all aspects of life, both material and spiritual, both mundane and sacred.

We have to break loose from our complacency in our relation with God and others, and really enter into a most meaningful engagement with him and everybody else.

We need to mature in our faith, after so many centuries already of Christian life. We need to man up so as to grapple with the real issues of our life and not get entangled with the non-essentials, though they too need to be duly attended to and related to what is truly important.

I know the transition is not easy. But it can be facilitated if we try our best to put our mind and heart, plus all our resources, into the task of rebuilding simultaneously our spiritual life and our churches. This can be done. This is not a quixotic dream.

We need to get back on our feet and move on with a revitalized and purified sense of purpose in life. We have to rise from the ruins, counting on God’s grace and our all-out effort.

Christ has reassured us that we can resurrect not only on the last day, but also on any day as long as make the necessary changes in our life. His promise of a new creation is effective as often as we decide to return to him and to take him and his beautiful will for us seriously.

This, I believe, is how we should react to the loss of our beautiful churches and the devastation of the earthquake. God is planting a seed in us that has to die first in order to grow and bear more fruit.