Our spiritual and supernatural bearing

By: Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE all have to learn to develop our spiritual and supernatural bearing, since this is what is proper to us. As persons with intelligence and will, we cannot help but have a spiritual character in our life. With these natural endowments, we are meant to enter into the spiritual world of ideas and rationality, of cognition and love that goes beyond the material and sensible aspect of our life.

And as children of God, created in God’s image and likeness, we are meant to enter into an intimate relation with him, which cannot be other than supernatural, since God is beyond our nature. This is always possible since God gives us his grace, and we, on our part, with our spiritual endowment of intelligence and will, are enabled to be elevated to the supernatural order of God when we correspond to God’s grace.

This basic truth of our life should always be on our mind, and should animate all our thoughts, words and deeds. We need to pause from time to time to allow this truth to take hold of our mind and heart, and of our life, in general, using the appropriate means.

That is why we need to spend time praying and meditating on the truths of our faith, so that this spiritual and supernatural bearing that we should aim at having can take root and develop. And all throughout the day, we have to have recourse to certain practices that not only would remind us of this truth, but would also help us live it.

As children of God, we are actually being conformed to Christ who is the Son of God who became man so that we may have a way to becoming like God, as God wants us to be.

We cannot overemphasize this wonderful truth of our faith about ourselves. This is what our Catechism says about this point: “The Word (the son of God) became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature.’ ‘For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.’

“‘For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.’ ‘The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.’” (460)

This truth of faith about ourselves should fill us with awe together with a great sense of responsibility, because while this privilege is gratuitously given to us by God, we are also meant to correspond to it as best that we can.

This spiritual and supernatural bearing of ours does not in any way detract, undermine, much less, nullify our humanity. It rather purifies and elevates our humanity to its most perfect state. We should just learn to adapt ourselves to this basic truth about ourselves, conquering the initial awkwardness we may feel about it, and deploying all our powers to achieve it with the grace of God.

Definitely, this spiritual and supernatural bearing of ours would lead us to refer everything in our life to God, to see God in everything and to discern his abiding providence over all his creation.

It will be shaped and directed by God’s gifts of faith, hope and charity that, in turn, will inspire the development of the human virtues like humility, prudence, justice, temperance, etc.

Let us hope that each one of us, in any way possible and practicable given our peculiar circumstances, can find a way to acquire and maintain this spiritual and supernatural bearing that is proper to us. And let us help everybody else to have it too, giving good example and timely pieces of advice culled from our own experience, prayer and study.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com