‘Lord, you will show us the path of life’

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THAT’S the responsorial psalm of the Mass of the 3^rd Sunday of Easter, Year A. It’s taken from Psalm 16,11. It’s again another reassurance from God that despite the complexities of our life today that offers us all sorts of pathways that can be both alluring and deceptive, in the end it is the Lord who will show us the true path of life, the path that leads us to our eternal life.

We should not be too worried with what we have to contend these days. As long as we stick with Christ through the many instrumentalities made available to us, we can feel sure that we would be on the right track. Obviously, this would involve a lot of effort and sacrifice, and nothing less than the cross of Christ itself, but the final victory is guaranteed for us.

The challenge for us is how we can closely follow Christ who not only shows the way but also leads and accompanies us along the way. This, in essence, is what holiness is all about, holiness lived in our day-to-day routine.

This can mean that we should try our best to imitate Christ in our thoughts, feelings, words and deeds. If we manage to do that, it would surely have the effect of us loving God and everybody else, irrespective of how they are to us. It would involve a love that would lead us to develop other virtues and to grow in them, like the virtues of humility, justice, integrity, solidarity, charity, etc. It’s a love that would keep us going and growing.

If we follow Christ closely, we would know how to do our daily work well, honestly and fairly. As a consequence, we would be sanctifying our work itself and the world in general from the inside. In a sense, we would be making the Gospel present in all our temporal affairs, be they brilliant or humble and hidden. What truly matters here is the love we put into our work, and not so much the success of our work in terms of money, fame, etc.

But we might ask: can we really deal with Christ directly? The answer is: of course, we can always talk with Christ. It should be the most normal thing to do, since in the first place Christ who is God is always with us. While we cannot always have anybody to talk to, and sometimes we can even forget to talk with our own selves, God on the other hand is always with us and is always willing to listen and talk to us too.

That’s his nature. That’s his desire. God is the very support of our own existence, and that of everybody and everything else. And he, mind you, does not support our life only in a passive way. He’s full of love, of solicitude, of attention and concern. He’s actually hot with us.

St. Augustine said, “to know where God is may be difficult, but to know where God is not, that is even more difficult!” Christ himself reassured his apostles, “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (Mt 28,20)

We just have to learn how to acknowledge this reality. Our problem is that we restrict our grasp of reality to what is observable only to the senses, and captured by our feelings. Our thinking is often so dominated by these human faculties alone that it fails to enter into the spiritual and supernatural realities. We need to do something about this problem.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com