Unifying Our External Senses and Our Spiritual Powers

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE should do our best to pursue this ideal. We know that due to our wounded condition here on earth, there is division and conflict between our corporeal and spiritual dimensions of our life. St. Paul articulated this condition well when he said: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Rom 7,19)

But there is always hope as long as we also train ourselves precisely to unify our external senses and corporeal faculties, and our spiritual powers. Unifying our external senses and our spiritual powers brings about the basic unity of life we are meant to have. It’s a way to achieve that ideal condition of our life where we become recollected and contemplative even in the midst of our earthly affairs.

And by unity of life, we mean the ideal of first of all letting our spiritual powers be animated by the spirit of God, and then letting our spiritual powers animate our external senses. The perfection of this unity of life is when we manage to unite ourselves in the life and nature of God as we are meant to be, since we are God’s image and likeness.

Of course, our external senses—sight, hearing, feeling, etc.—feed our spiritual powers of our intelligence and will with raw data, but these spiritual powers of ours, in a manner of speaking, should refine and purify the data received, and animate them with the spirit of God, that is, with our faith, hope and charity.

We should avoid reversing the roles between our corporeal and spiritual faculties, making our external senses rule and dominate our spiritual powers. Nowadays, this anomaly is taking place and is quite common even. Our external senses are now overstimulated to such an extent that they deaden or numb our spiritual faculties.

As consequences, we are seeing a rise in mental illness and a greater vulnerability to demonic possessions and other irregular situations. Many people, especially the young ones, are falling into all kinds of obsessions and addictions.

The main problem, of course, is that the senses are not united or inspired by faith. They are just left on their own, ruled mainly by instincts and other biological factors. Or at best they may be guided only by an intelligence that is not yet enlightened by faith.

And things can become so bad that these senses can get quite hostile to anything related to faith that definitely involves spiritual and supernatural realities. We need to realize that the first, last and constant object that our senses should perceive is God since he is the origin of everything, the maintainer of the existence of all things. He is everywhere.

As St. Augustine once said: “To find where God is may be difficult, but to find where he is not, that is even more difficult.” And to be sure, God’s presence in everything is not something cold and indifferent. It is full of love and solicitude. He is always and actively intervening in our lives.

We need to train our senses to be guided by our Christian faith, hope and charity, so we can capture this very consoling reality. They should not just be left on their own, guided and ruled only by factors other than our faith, hope and charity. That state of affairs would lead us nowhere other than trouble.

Thus, if we are serious with guiding our senses and emotions with faith, we have to realize that our faith should not just be an intellectual affair, lived and pursued only in the spiritual world of good intentions and right doctrine. It has to involve the basic elements of our humanity, which are our senses, our feelings, our emotions and passions.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com