Our be-all and end-all

By: Fr. Roy Cimagala

WHAT is the ultimate and constant purpose of our life? It is to be like God as God wants us to be. We have been created in his image and likeness. He wants us to be like him, full of love. We are meant to share his very own life.

To be sure, God will do it for us. On our own, we can never attain that ideal. But we have to give our all to correspond to God’s will for us like good workers toward their master. Otherwise, we will frustrate God deepest wish for us. That correspondence is the be-all and end-all of our lives.

In short, everything that we are, that we have and that we do should be oriented toward this final aim of our life. Nothing should be done without this ultimate goal in mind. In a sense, this is the only thing necessary in life.

We may have many different goals, objectives, ambitions in life, but all of them should be subordinated and made to work for our life’s be-all and end-all. And our ultimate goal can also be described as nothing other than our own sanctification and salvation. In other words, everything that we do should work for our sanctification and the salvation of all mankind.

In our life, we will always have some short-term, medium-term and long-term goals. We can have a goal set for each of the different aspects of our life: physical, social, family, professional, etc. But we need to see to it that all these goals, in some kind of synergy, would always reinforce the ultimate and constant goal of our own sanctification and the salvation of mankind.

We need to broaden our understanding of the real purpose of our lives and get to put ourselves into its dynamics. At this juncture of our life in the world, we need to know better about our life’s be-all and end-all and avoid pursuing things that do not contribute to it.

It is interesting to note that actually everything in our life can be made to work for this be-all and end-all of our life. Our mundane and temporal affairs should be made to work for our ultimate aim in life. Even our limitations and weaknesses, our mistakes and failures can be taken advantage of to pursue this ultimate goal. The secret is always having the intention to offer everything to God and to act on it the way God in Christ through the Holy Spirit does.

In this regard, it is always good to be reminded of the need to rectify our intentions always. Things always start with our intentions. And let’s hope that we can keep that rectitude of intention all the time, even in our trying moments when we are intensely tempted and pressured to go along the ways of pride, vanity, greed, or the world in general.

To have the rectitude of intention means to assume the mind of Christ in doing what he did to save us. He preached, he did a lot of good, including performing some miracles. And in the end, he went through his passion and death just to sanctify and save us. His was pure love, and that is what we are supposed to reflect in our life also.

Whenever we plan something, we should never forget to ask whether that something would reinforce our goal of sanctification and salvation. We should not just stop at the level of worldly values like profitability, practicability and the like when we do some planning.

Definitely, we need to do our planning in deep prayer. We just cannot do our planning in the context of purely worldly considerations. We have to relate everything to God. It should be love for God that drives us to think, speak and act, and to undertake all kinds of projects here on earth.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com