The sense of the eternal

WE need to develop this sense of the eternal because that is proper to us. It’s not a luxury, and much less is it an exercise in fantastic, delusional futility. It is a necessity. Without it, we would be lost in this great and largely uncharted ocean that our world is.

 

As human persons with a spiritual soul, we are not meant to live only in time. We just don’t have a temporal, mundane life, governed only by temporal and worldly values. We are meant for the eternal life with eternal laws governing it.

It would be good that we cultivate an abiding sense of the eternal, for that would give us the whole picture of our life and would provide us with the ultimate standards of our life by which all our mundane affairs and concerns ought to be related and assessed.

We should not be contented with merely human and natural criteria as we live our life here on earth. No matter how indispensable they also are, they only have a relative value, effective only when organically related to the eternal virtues of faith, hope and charity.

The standards of efficiency, effectivity, profitability, etc., are indeed very helpful, but they can only serve us so much. They still are in need of a more radical motivation and an ultimate end. It’s the sense of the eternal that would make us most broad-minded and that goes all the way in satisfying all the requirements of our dignity.

These eternal, theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are what would lead us to our eternal life. They actually are the initiatives of God, our Creator and Father, whose image and likeness we all are, and from whom we come and to whom we belong. They are not our inventions.

Precisely, as his image and likeness, we are meant to belong to him in a most intimate way by sharing in his life and nature. This is made possible through his grace that brings with it faith, hope and charity and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Oh, how important and crucial it is then to know at least the basic truth about our relation with God so that we would know how to keep and enliven that relation, ever mindful of our duties and responsibilities arising from it.

Unfortunately, this relation, if ever we are still aware of it, is often taken for granted, or is mainly influenced by elements of sentimentalism, social and cultural conditionings, and the like. It is hardly developed according to the terms of the God-given gifts of faith, hope and charity.

To be sure, these gifts of faith, hope and charity are given to us abundantly. In this, God is never sparing. But it is up to us to get as much of them as we can, and to keep and develop them properly, without wasting them.

We can claim this because of the fact that God has sent his Son to us to save us, to heal and re-create us. And after the Son has accomplished his mission, God now has sent us the Holy Spirit to keep alive the redemptive work of the Son-made-man, Jesus Christ.

With the Holy Spirit, we are given some special gifts and fruits that would further facilitate the workings of faith, hope and charity in us. It’s very important that we be keenly aware of this truth of our faith, so we can do our part of conforming ourselves to that reality.

To be sure, we are equipped with enough God-given powers to properly handle these supernatural gifts God is giving us. Our intelligence and will, or what are called our spiritual faculties, can manage with God’s grace to process the content and standards of the divine, supernatural gifts.

It is crucial that we learn how to keep our spiritual faculties properly grounded and oriented. They just should not be contented with processing purely worldly things, no matter how reasonable or scientific or artistic they are. They need to enter into the world of the supernatural faith, hope and charity.

Thus, we need to learn how to be recollected, how to keep our senses, our feelings, emotions and passions, our thinking and activities, always beginning and ending with God, as what we usually say in our prayers.

Immersing ourselves in God does not compromise our immersion in our worldly affairs. What it does is to help us immerse ourselves in them properly, supernaturalizing them and relating them to our eternal life with God, our ultimate end!