Part 1
The Story
On
one occasion Mother Teresa (now Blessed) was visiting a poverty-stricken
village in South America. She was by then quite famous, and in her entourage
was a clutch of press correspondents. As she approached the village perimeter
the children ran out to meet her, screaming with joy, kissing and tugging at
her hands. The press correspondents began quizzing each other about what the
poor villagers would ask of Mother: tin sheets for their shanty houses,
second-hand clothes from Germany, milk power that had become synonymous with
Mother Teresa? Imagine their surprise when the villages came out to greet her,
arms outstretched, with the plea: “Mother, give us God! Mother, give us God!”
Reflection
Like
the elders of that poverty-stricken village each one of us can say, “Mother,
give me God. Give me God!” I want God, I just want him; give me God. This is my
ultimate desire, the exhaustive, absolute, and eternal consummation. I am in
God, and God is all in all. He made me in order to possess me, as if he were
incomplete without me. What compelled God to create me? Was there a higher
impulse than himself that made him freely decide to create me? As there can be
nothing higher than God, that very impulse is God. That is why God is pure
dynamic, unalloyed, limitless power, creating without loss or diminution. This
power is love, a concept that is explanatory of the same reality.
God=Power=Lover, creating me for himself. Each one of us desires to measure up
to the divine expectation, which is possible by his mercy.
What
is love? Love is the effective desire for the good of the other. Every good is
a participation of the total good that is God, which explains why every being
is good. And that is also why my happiness is to be found, not in earthly or
emotional pleasure, but in the perfection of being. Good is what God has
implanted in our being and not anything that we can invent or fabricate. And
since he has created us free we can freely discover the good that God desires
for us. Happy the man whose free choice of the good in every circumstance
coincides with God’s desire! Then he is truly godly, godlike, a participant of
the divine nature. From now on he shares the divine impulse to create the good.
Let goodness spread.
Philosophy of the Good
Man’s good, well-being and happiness consist
in the development and flourishing of the dynamic tendencies inscribed in his
nature; tendencies such as education and art, relationships and community,
self-giving and consummation. The activation of these dynamics are monitored by
and swept up into faith, divine faith, in fact, which is the objective fact of
God’s self-giving to man and man’s acceptance. It is in the interplay of this
mutual surrender that the movement of man’s nature towards fulfilment can be
achieved. In this sense man’s nature is already stamped with the supernatural
existential. This, be it noted, is no claim on the supernatural as something
earned or deserved, but only a benchmark that a supreme gift is anticipated in
hope and animated by faith. From beginning to end and for all eternity man
remains pure receiver and God pure giver.
THE BEDROCK
OF RELIGION
Part 2
Characteristic of Human Nature
What
is the essential characteristic of human nature? In philosophy man is defined
merely, though correctly, as “rational animal.” Now when faith illumines and
elevates human nature man becomes that rational material that can be moulded
and shaped in the hands of God into a new being that is godlike and
transcendent. Thus understood, by the
act of natural creation human nature is endowed by that quality without which
it would be less than human, a quality that specifies humanity itself, and that
quality is the radical intentionality(tendency) towards total truth and total
good, which we call God. This characteristic is not something adventitious but
it is given at creation and is the most fundamental factor of human nature.
The
very essence of man is his hunger for God. God put it there when he created
man, and man is unintelligible without it. This hunger is not merely an open
capacity, nor even a power that can grasp and possess God by its own potential.
It can only wait and pray and thirst for God to descend and give himself, and
that by a supremely free act. This divine descent activates and enables this
capacity in man to accept and retain the divine presence. Even though he
created man in such a way that man can be fulfilled only by him, yet God is no
way constrained to give himself to man. He is entirely free in this matter.
God
is free to give, and man is free to receive. Man is also free, by God’s gift,
to refuse. Instead of satisfying his hunger for God’s self-gift, as he was made
to, he can attempt to divert the radical intentionality by affirming and
possessing things of ephemeral value and thereby deny or frustrate the
essential tendency towards God. This spells misery for him, whereas he should
have subsumed all creatures and limited goods into the grand sweep of the
radical intentionality; after all, creatures are good in themselves by
participation in the supreme good. The secret of the good life is to learn how
to assimilate all creatures and situations into the grand procession to the divine
realm. This is best done by service to humanity and material creation.
God
created man in such a way that man could receive, accept and rejoice in God’s
free self-gift to him. One can dare to say that God created man so that God could
have faith in man. This is why faith is supernatural inasmuch as God alone is
capable of it. As soon as man wakes up to God’s loving intent of self-giving
and accepts the same, he in turn makes an act of faith. Thus, man’s act of
faith is secondary, yet supernatural since it is empowered by divine faith
(i.e. God’s act of faith in him).
Bedrock of formal religions
This
covenantal (not contractual) relationship between God and man is the bedrock of
all formal religions with their accompaniments of rituals and hierarchies.
Religious fundamentalism, crusades and jihads are precipitated when the formal
structures slide away from the foundation common to all faiths. They need to be
pulled back on to their common foundation and so become houses built on rock,
the common substratum that does not distinguish between different rituals.
Humanity is a diverse community; diverse not only in terms of race, but also in
terms of language, culture and national ambition. This diversity is a source of
richness, as every drop of humanity reflects a Creator who has imprinted within
the hearts of all men and women, irrespective of the disparity, a “divine
character”. All the creatures of the one God should not be strangers or enemies
to each other without common ground whereon to show their friendship and the
peace between them. Diversity enhances the sublime nature of the unity.
Humanity comes to understand that what separates is as God given as what
unifies, and that what separates also serves the unity. A conscious agreement
to a set of beliefs by peoples as racially and culturally distinct as can be
empowers the agreed beliefs with a strength that transcends all possible
distinction.
It
is on this foundational rock that Jesus has built his church. Peter, “the
rock”, stands for common human nature. His church is the renewed humanity
promised by God himself through the prophets. This is how the treatise on
ecclesiology begins. Sacraments, liturgy, ritual, dogmas, hierarchy,
paraliturgy, devotions and novenas, charismatic conventions, pilgrimages and
festivals; all these are outcrops and supports of that most fundamental
reality, namely, that man is made for God. To be absorbed or lost in the
symbols and supports is to miss the reality. Roman Catholics, particularly,
should go easy on the candles and incense!
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