‘Today, a great light has come’

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!

On this most blessed and joyous day when we liturgically celebrate the birth of the very pattern and savior of our humanity, it is most apt to echo as often as we can this gospel acclamation in one of the Masses of Christmas. For, indeed, what can be a light better than him.

That is why we have to be most wary of today’s many lights that can offer us some convenient and advantageous chunks of knowledge but can subtly lead us astray. Among them are some ideological and cultural trends like secularism and humanism, materialism and consumerism, misinformation and disinformation, false prophets and gurus, and some philosophies and ideologies.

Secularism and humanism, for example, would put our human reason as our supreme guide, regarding themselves as completely autonomous and freed from any submission to a law above themselves and to any spiritual and divine guidance.

Materialism and consumerism would make the pursuit of wealth, status and possessions as our ultimate goal. And nowadays, we are practically flooded with all kinds of misinformation and disinformation that are cleverly invented with the help of the powerful artificial intelligence that can only work according to the motives of their users.

This is not mention that we are also witnessing today the emergence of the so-called prophets and gurus who claim to have some supernatural mandate but actually are just working according to their different subjective agendas.

Of course, we are not lacking in some bright guys who create certain philosophies and ideologies that contradict the Christian faith, like modernism, relativism and the like.

We seem to live out what St. Paul once warned us: “The time will come when men will not endure sound doctrine; but having itching ears, they shall heap to themselves teachers in accordance with their own lusts.” (2 Tim 4,3)

We really need to be truly prepared and adequately equipped to deal with these elements that are making our world more confusing and complicated. And so, we can never overdo to carry out our duty to really know Christ through and through and follow “the way, the truth and the life” that he is offering us.

Yes, Christ is the true light since he is the spirit and embodiment of truth itself, providing us with spiritual guidance in all our temporal affairs, as well as wisdom, and ultimately winning for us our own salvation when we would be reunited with the very origin of our humanity—God himself.

It is Christ who fully reveals to us who we really are, what the purpose of our life here on earth is, and how we can pursue that goal, given our wounded condition due to our human frailties and our sinfulness.

We should train ourselves to look for Christ as our true light and to consider whatever lights we can have in this world as coming from God and meant to lead us to God. In other words, all the other lights we have in this world should be seen in the context of Christ’s light. Otherwise, these lights can only be false and deceiving.

This can only mean that we have to study, meditate, assimilate and act in an abiding way the doctrine of our Christian faith as can be drawn from the Bible, the Church magisterium and Church approved traditions. We have to do it in such a way that we can truly feel that we are becoming more and more like Christ, sharing in his very own light as we navigate the seas of our life.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com