Harmonizing our life’s different dimensions

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

IT’S obvious that we have to contend with the many aspects and dimensions of our life—the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, the material and the spiritual, etc. We cannot deny that very often we see them competing or even in conflict with each other.

We, therefore, need to tackle the challenge and the complicated task of how to harmonize them in such a way that we can achieve what we may call as unity of life that pursues the proper and ultimate goal of our life.

Said in another way, we have to find a way of how we can live our spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life with naturalness as we go through our daily activities and concerns. The art and skills that are appropriate for this need should be learned and adopted as early as possible.

Definitely, this challenge and task would demand a lot of requirements from us. But to be sure, we can say that the basic requirement is for us to be fully identified with Christ, “the perfect God and the perfect man” (perfectus Deus, perfectus homo).

He is the very personification of how to integrate the different aspects of our life so we can achieve a certain consistency and continuity that would pursue the ultimate goal of our life.

In this regard, we cannot overemphasize the need for us to have regular time for prayer and avail of a plan of continuing formation so that our relation with Christ would really become alive and in a way that can effectively guide us in our daily activities.

With Christ, we would know how to live naturalness as we pursue our supernatural goal in the middle of the world. It has something to do with how to handle our human condition considering what we ought to be and what we are at the moment. Fact is, we have a supernatural goal, nothing less than to be united with God, which we have to pursue in the context of our human and natural world.

Naturalness is about how to mix the spiritual and material dimensions of our life, our personal and social aspects, and other elements in our life that, given the way we are, appear to compete with each other. How to integrate and harmonize them is the task of naturalness.

Naturalness is a very active affair, lived day to day, moment to moment, as we grapple with the continuous flow of our concerns. It’s the front man who does the dirty job of the bigger virtues of discretion, prudence and ultimately charity, the foot soldier who does the hand-to-hand combat, the peddler who does the door-to-door selling.

It has to know when to push and when to pull, what to say and show and what to be quiet about and hide. Obviously, it has to follow a game plan, with a clear goal in mind and a detailed knowledge of all the elements it has to contend with.

It has to know when to be active and when to be passive, when to be aggressive and when to be patient and tolerant. Of course, in our spiritual life, these elements while initially contrasting, can be blended and lived simultaneously, obviously as an effect of grace and our cleverness.

It also has to know how to project oneself to the future, given the data of the present and of the past. It has to learn how to relate history and current events with eternity. It should know how to connect the mundane with the sacred.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com