God and our mundane affairs

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WITH Christ telling his disciples not to give what is holy to dogs, or throw one’s pearls before swine, (cfr. Mt 7,6) we are somehow reminded that in our worldly affairs, no matter how technical they are or physically straining and dirty, we should never forget that God is always there, and that they are meant to be done or attended to with God and for God always.

In other words, we should avoid being swallowed up by the mundanity of these affairs as if God has nothing to do with them. We should avoid being so absorbed by them that we would not have God in our mind and heart.

This definitely would require of us a certain discipline that would put God at the center and peak of our human activities. For this, we have to learn how to be recollected amid the hustle and bustle of our daily activities.

Yes, we have to learn this skill. It’s actually a fundamental and indispensable skill. Without it, there’s no other way but for us to get confused and lost in our worldly and temporal affairs. And instead of reaching our final and proper destination, we end up somewhere else.

We have to learn to gather all our powers and faculties together so they can be engaged with their proper and ultimate objects which, ultimately, are God and others. We have to see to it that everything we do and get involved in, somehow get into the lifelong dynamic of loving God and others.

What we have to avoid is our tendency to fall into self-indulgence, pursuing only or getting entangled simply with our own interests and goals which usually are of the practical, worldly and temporal ones, and nothing beyond.

What we also have to avoid is to have our powers and faculties scattered and often in conflict with one another, entangled with objects that, though having some validity, are not the proper and ultimate objects we should try to pursue.

This need for recollection simply indicates that our life consists of different aspects and levels that we have to orchestrate to be able to reach our final end. We just cannot go about reacting spontaneously to things, depending solely on instincts and feelings. We are meant for something much, much more than these.

Our tendency, given our fallen nature and the effects of our personal sins, is to get dispersed in our attention and to plunge into activism. In the process, we lose our interior serenity and eventually our true way.

The loss of serenity can lead us to bad consequences—loss of self-control and dominion over things, proneness to temptations, vices and sins, disorder in our sense of priority, etc.

For Christian believers, the source and end of their consciousness should be God. This is simply because the Christian faith teaches that God is the creator of the whole universe, including us, and continues to govern us intimately in our hearts. There should therefore be a living relationship between God and the believer.

We need to be focused always on him. Straying from him would be to stray from reality. It would lead us to make our own reality and our own world, with consequences that sooner or later will always be bad for us.

This human need for recollection will always bring us to the realization of the existence of God, with the corresponding rights and duties towards him. We should therefore see that everything in our life has God in it, or at least traces of God in it. We just have to learn how to discover God in these things.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com