Detached While Immersed in the Things of this World

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THIS is the condition proper to us in this world. We have to see to it that we are detached from the things of the world so we can fully give ourselves to God. We have to be wary of our tendency to be easily attached and trapped in our worldly and temporal affairs, losing sight of our abiding and ultimate goal which is to be with God always.

This is what is meant when Christ declared what the greatest commandment was. “Thou shalt love the Lord they God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with whole strength,” he said. (Mk 12,30)

Reiterating the same point, Christ also said: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Mt 6,33) And St. Paul added: “Seek the things that are above.” (Col 3,1)

But this does not mean that we have to stay away from the world. On the contrary, we have to be immersed in it as much as possible, loving it the way God loves it. And that’s because God precisely placed us in the world to test us if what he wants us to be—that is, to be his image and likeness—is also what we ourselves would like to be, through the way we handle the things of the world. The world is where we have our constant contact with God.

Let’s remember that part of the original mandate God gave to our first parents, and now to us, is to “subdue the earth.” (Gen 1,28) That simply means that we have to develop the things of the world according to God’s will and ways, in accordance to what the parable of the talents teaches us (cfr. Mt 25,14-30). There Christ shows us that we have been given abilities and resources so we can fulfill God’s will for us and show our love for him.

But, yes, we have to be careful not to be trapped in the things of this world. We need to realize that the things of the world and our temporal affairs are precisely where God engages us. God intervenes in all the events, conditions and circumstances of our life here on earth. Our relation with him is lived and developed in the very things that we handle or get involved in this world.

Our relation with God is not purely spiritual and intellectual, abstracted from the temporal and material dimensions of our life. Our relation with him is developed in the way we live our personal and family life, in the way we carry out our professional work, our business and politics, our social and cultural life, our concerns and the different issues we encounter in life.

That is why, our prayer, which is how we relate ourselves to God, cannot simply be an exercise of philosophizing and theologizing. It has to tackle what we can discern from what God is telling or showing us in our actual life that is immersed in the things of this world.

We have to avoid what we may consider as the extremes of intellectualism or spiritualism, on the one hand, and materialism and worldliness, on the other. We have to learn how to blend in our prayer these two dimensions of our life—the material and the spiritual, the temporal and eternal, the mundane and the sacred.

That is why we need how to be properly detached from the things of this world so we can give our whole selves to God even as we should immerse ourselves as fully as possible in the things of this world.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com