We have the highest dignity in the whole universe

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE should be most aware of this fundamental truth about ourselves. It should make us most happy and most unwilling to exchange it for something else that would undermine it. No amount of worldly pleasure, fame and wealth can surpass and outshine it.

And the simple reason is that we have been made in God’s image and likeness, sharers of his life and of his very nature. God shares his life and his very self with us, and it is just up to us to correspond to that truth by following God’s will and ways, instead of just following our own will.

Sad to say, we are notorious for doing the opposite. Instead of following God’s will, we prefer to simply do ours. It’s like we make ourselves our own God which is a very strong temptation to us since we usually think that our freedom entitles, nay, commands us to be simply on our own, guided only by our own estimation of things.

We need to strengthen our self-awareness of this basic truth about ourselves, recognizing our real worth and value as a child of God who gives us everything to be truly his child.

For this, we need to grow spiritually by deepening our relationship with God through prayer and continuing study of our faith so we would know God more and more, so that by so doing we also would know ourselves better. That’s simply because how God is should also be how we should be.

It may be incredible and hard to accept, but that who we really are. Indeed, for us to be able to accept this truth and live by it, we need to be truly humble, to continually deny ourselves since we always have the tendency to simply follow what we think instead of what our Christian faith teaches us.

Of course, to become more and more like God as we should, we need to develop virtues that would facilitate our unity and identification with God. To mention a few, aside from humility, we need to be compassionate, kind, magnanimous, patient.

We should realize that the most important duty we have is to earnestly know and fulfill the will of God for us at every moment. We need to train ourselves for this duty, since we all know that we always tend to do our own will rather than God’s will.

This is a basic truth that we need to spread around more widely and abidingly, since it is steadily and even systematically forgotten and, nowadays, even contradicted in many instances. We need to inculcate this truth to children as early as when they can understand and appreciate it. Then let’s give them the example of how it is lived.

God’s will is the source of everything in the universe. The whole of creation in all its existence, unity, truth, goodness and beauty starts from God’s will and is maintained by it. The entire range and scope of reality—be it material or spiritual, natural or supernatural, temporal or eternal—is “contained” there, not only theoretically but in vivo.

We need to pound it hard into our mind and heart that we need live by God’s will if we truly want to keep our dignity as children of God! We have to be wary of the many things that would now desensitize us from this need as we are prodded to go full-blast into self-indulgence.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com