The principal and ultimate end of all we do

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

GIVEN who we really are and how we are in this life, we should make sure that everything that we do knowingly and intentionally should have God as its principal and ultimate end.

That’s because God is our creator who created us in his very image and likeness. As such we are supposed to share in his very life and nature. That’s the goal that we have to pursue in this life which is actually some kind of a testing ground to see whether what God wants us to be is also we ourselves would like to be.

And that means that we are expected to do everything with God and for God. That way, with whatever we do in this life, we would be approaching or pursuing the real and ultimate goal of our life. We should have the sensation that each day we are becoming more and more like God as he wants us to be.

We need to realize that everything that we do is actually a choice we are given to see if we want to be like God or we would just like to be on our own which, in the end, would lead us nowhere but to be against God.

We have to be clear and explicit about the intention of all our human acts. God should be the principal end of our actions in the sense that he should not just be treated as a minor or peripheral or optional motive for all our actions. In everything that we do, we should be aware that it is done because of God, first, last and always.

Besides, God should also be the ultimate end of all our actions. Nothing and no one is higher than him. He can never be considered simply as an intermediate end. We can have many, and even endless, intermediate intentions in our actions—like earning money, helping the family, succeeding in some business, etc.—but all these should lead us to God.

Because of that, we should always find ways of how we can relate everything to God. And this task can involve a number of things. We have to develop a strong and intimate relation with God, trying to know him more and more by studying the doctrine of our faith, gaining intimacy with him through prayer and meditation, coming up with an effective plan of life that would keep our intimate relation with God alive and abiding, etc.

That is why we have to realize that we need to undergo a continuing and life-long spiritual formation. And that’s because the basics and essentials, the old and absolute truth, which we may already know, will always have to cope and somehow need to be enriched by the changing incidentals in life, by the relative, innovative and other evolving things in our life.

In his second letter, St. Peter urges us to go on with our formation: “Strive diligently to supply your faith with virtue, your virtue with knowledge, your knowledge with self-control, your self-control with patience, your patience with piety, your piety with fraternal love, your fraternal love with charity.” (1,5-7)

And as we all know, charity is a never-ending affair, ever making new demands on us, and introducing us to more aspects, dimensions and challenges in life. It will always push us to do more, to give more, to be more.

With the increasingly complicated problems and challenges in our life today, we really need to do things with God and for God since he is the one who knows all things, who has the ultimate solutions to our problems, who can make the impossible possible.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com