The truth will set you free

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matt 5:16)

After unveiling, in the previous articles, the vows of poverty and chastity, I now complete the tripod on which the religious life is supported by reflecting on the vow of obedience. The religious is called to be a beacon, a guide to lead others to Heaven by living, in the here and now, the same life that all are called to live eternally in Heaven; he is called to embody the values of the Kingdom and to guide mankind in the dialectics of wealth-detachment, love-sex, and power-freedom-fidelity with his experience in living out the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, respectively.

To know the truth
If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. (Jn. 8:31-32)

Stewards, not owners - The Church tells us that our life is not our own, but rather a gift from God; we have done nothing to merit it, nor were we consulted as to whether or not we want to live it. In its totality, life is indeed a gift. With respect to the first part of this life though, the time in which we live on earth, rather than a gift it is more like a loan. The Book of Genesis says that God made man from dust and breathed into his nostrils to give him life. By the same manner that He breathed in and we started to live, one day He will breathe out and we shall die.

The indication that life is a loan is clearly seen in the parable of the talents. All loans must render interest; our lives must be profitable; they must be productive; not necessarily reproductive, but productive. We must leave this world a better place than when we found it; we have to make a difference, be part of the solution and not part of the problem; in other words, our lives should contribute to the solution of a better world, and not contribute to its problem, that is, leave the world in a worse shape than when we found it. As suggested by the parable of the talents, we need to do something with our life, we cannot return it exactly as we have received it.

All good stewards have the "books" in order because no one knows the day nor the hour when the owner, or the government auditor, will come to inspect the accounts. For this reason we need to make regular check-ups of our stewardship.  On this regard, the Church has a sacrament, the sacrament of penance; those who use this sacrament periodically, providing accounts of inputs and outputs, will know whether their finances are growing or are heading for bankruptcy. It is also an indispensable exercise of self-evaluation for personal growth at all levels.

Builders, not architects -- Every one of us comes into this world as part of a big project. We came because God willed it. The circumstances of our birth are irrelevant; they neither increase nor decrease our dignity. We are as much sons and daughters of God irrespective of how we were conceived, be it out of love, from accident, from prostitution, a night of pleasure or even as the result of a rape. Every human life that comes into this world, from conception to its natural death, is precious and viable, and therefore sacred.

God writes straight on crooked lines. Both our righteousness and our sinfulness serve to carry out God’s designs.  For Him there are no illegitimate children nor children of blue blood; to everyone He is the Father; we are all equal in dignity, heirs to the eternal life...

Just as no houses in our cities and villages are built without first being properly designed and planned, no life comes into this world without God having mapped out a project for it; that is, without Him first designing a plan.

You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. (Jn. 15:16) -- We are therefore not the designers of our destinies; we are called to be a house built on rock, if we listen to the Word, that is, if we know the plan that relates to our lives, and put it into practice, bringing it into fruition according to the plan designed by God.

Since we are not the owners of our lives we are also not the architects but rather the masons or master-of-works. The architect of everything and everyone, the Creator of all is God; the design, project or plan for our lives is with Him and for us to know what it is we need to periodically consult Him, as we build our lives, our homes.

The builder who does not consult the architect on a regular basis runs the risk of building something not according to the plan. Just as it is always embarrassing when this happens in our cities, houses that were not given the permit to be inhabited, some even to the point of needing to be torn down because they were not built according to the drawing.  A worse embarrassment still is to stand before God with a life lived against His will.

The regular consultation, continuous and constant, that the builder must make with the architect is called prayer. Jesus used to spend the whole night in prayer to know what God’s will was for him. We too must do likewise because it is His will and not ours that we must act upon. It is He who calls us and gives us the vocation and sufficient talents to make our lives viable in a profession or a mission.

Just as the builder only asks for the instructions of the foundation when he is working on the foundation, and not for the instructions of the roof, because the time has not yet come to build it, prayer should be a continuous and constant process that goes step by step with the building of our lives. The vision of the whole and the ensemble, the design as well as the model of the plan, only God has them and only at the end will we see and be confronted with the final result. Those who never pray will never know what God’s plan is concerning them...

The true disciple of Christ is obedient, just as the Master is obedient to the Father. Whoever loves me follows my commandments; the disciple is the one who hears the word and puts it into practice.  To remain faithful to the message of the Master means therefore to obey the directives of this message.

The truth leads to freedom, freedom leads to the truth
Mastering oneself is the greatest of empires...
How can anyone say that he is free if he is governed by his own desires? Socrates
I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. (Jn. 14:6)

Before we can submit to a project drawn by God and be a real contributor in the world; before we can give, heart and soul, to this project in which we give ourselves to the service of a cause, we need to be in full possession of ourselves. No one can give what he doesn't have, thus if we don’t possess ourselves we cannot make ourselves a gift to others.

So that we can be in charge we need to submit to the conflicting forces within us, which do not respond to our reason; we have to become masters of ourselves, winning the civil war that every man has within him.

Upon rebuking a teenager we often hear him say: “I can do whatever I want with my life"; many times those who say this are precisely the ones who have less power to do what they really should want with their lives. There is no freedom for... without the freedom from...We are not free to do whatever we want if we do not possess our innermost selves; or, if we are not free from vices, bad habits, manias and all sort of obsessive, compulsive, eccentric behaviours which have more power to govern our day-to-day lives than our intellect does; these eccentricities being all together quite capable at each moment of deciding what we do.

A man can allow a bad habit to have dominion over him, to the point that he cannot set himself free.  Similarly, he can let a desire to fully overwhelm and control him, so that he has no strength to get away from it. Completely enslaved by self-indulgence, this person can become schizophrenic, loving and hating his bad habits both at the same time. The one who has been caught in this cobweb of addiction, loses completely the power to do what he wants and what he wishes. As Jesus said, no one who sins can say that he is free.

Freedom is for the soul what bread is for the body. But if freedom is a human value, then like all other values, it is not something that we are born with but rather something that we acquire through effort, blood, sweat, and tears but most of all by God’s grace.

A life in Present Perfect
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, (...) it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. (...) For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  (Rom. 7:15-19)

In order for us to possess ourselves we need to know ourselves. In grammatical terms, it is an illusion to think that our lives run in the Simple Present, when 90% of our behaviour is influenced by our past. In reality, the tense of the verb which we live in is more like the Present Perfect which refers to an action that started in the past but still continues into the present.

We live in a present that is often invaded by the unresolved issues of our past. Most of the time, we are not even aware of this past which continues to reappear in our everyday life, and oblivious to our will, it can be triggered by any present event or circumstance. It is as if we were walking through a minefield with the risk of stepping on a bomb at any moment. When we live most of our lives unaware in the present perfect tense, our behavior would seem to be on some sort of autopilot mode, like an aeroplane at cruising altitude.

Know yourself -- The Socratic maxim sounds here in all its exuberance. I can only aspire to be free, to possess myself, in order to give myself up to a cause if I know myself. Knowledge means power; therefore if I know myself then I have power over myself. What I know of myself this I can control because knowledge also implies control; what I don't know of myself controls me and what is alien to my desire makes me behave as if I am on cruise control.

Our truth, our identity, has a historical dimension, it is something that has to be built. For this reason, in the same way that trees need to grow downwards by their roots in order to grow upwards, we also, in order to grow as people, need first to visit our past.

Like the tree that extends its roots into the depth of the soil to find nutrients and to balance its height, we too need to extend our knowledge, to the beginning of our lives, in order to understand completely how we became who we are, and so to be able to become what God calls us to be.

After we take control of our past, and become aware of everything that was good and bad that we did or happened to us, we must escape the temptation to deny whatever they may be and assume the responsibility of our history.

...You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Because we know the truth of our past, and we take responsibility for it, we now have the power to control its influence on our present. This time, no longer walking in a minefield nor led through life as if we were on autopilot, we are free because our behaviour is now decided directly by our reason. In this way we can now possess our time and energy and commit them to a cause of our choice.

                                    Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

In Spirit and in Truth

The woman said to him, 'Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem'. Jesus said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.(...) But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. John 4:19-21, 23

In two simple words -- Spirit and Truth - Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman and to all of us the essence of prayer. As God is a spiritual being, he is everywhere, prayer does not need done in a specific place; God transcends all places and at the same time is indwelling in all of them. Not restricted to a specific place, prayer is conditioned by our way of being and living. One can only pray, can only encounter God, when one lives and remains in the truth.

Yahweh, the God of the nomads
Greg Retallack did a research, where he established a relation between the identity of a deity worshipped in a particular temple and the location of this same temple. For example, the nomads living in areas with poor soils worshipped Hermes, the messenger of gods and the intercessor between mortals and the divine; peoples stationed in fertile terrains tend to worship gods of fertility like Hera.

Retallack concludes that the gods of ancient Greece did not arise from an imaginary poetic city, called Olympus, but they personify the lifestyles of those peoples; the bottom line, the ancients worshipped their own means of subsistence, or better said, they worshipped the One whom they believed would ensure these means.

God is a spiritual being - Compelled to guide their flocks in search of new pastures, peoples dedicated to pastoralism, like the Jewish people, are necessarily nomads. While the sedentary peoples build large temples and large statues to represent their beliefs; the nomads, in order not to carry heavy idols on their moves, conceptualized God as a Being who is at the same time transcendent and indwelling.

Transcendent because to be Creator of everything and everyone, he cannot be represented by anything that exists; for the nomads any material way of representing God is idolatry. Indwelling because he is in the heart of everything and each person, therefore easy to carry.

The Turkana, in northern Kenya, use the same word to mean both sky and God. In the same manner the Mongols, the Turks and the Tartars all worshipped Tengri, God of the blue sky. God, as in Heaven, is everywhere. A reality that is at the same time both transcendent and indwelling cannot be of material essence but rather of spiritual one.

God is a personal being -- Far from everything and everyone, shepherds spend a lot of time alone while keeping their flocks; the loneliness, fear and insecurity lead them to establish a relation with this spiritual Being; a Being who cares, protects and wants a personal relationship with each and every person. The deities of the sedentary peoples are materialistic and call the people to acquire more things. The deities of the nomads are spiritual and call the people to detach and disconnect from material goods to cultivate the spirit and to become much more.

Temples of the Holy Spirit (1Cor. 3:16)
Jesus answered him, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them... John. 14:23

God, a spiritual being, created us in his image and likeness; for this reason we are both a body, that is, we have a physical dimension and a spirit, we have a spiritual dimension. Our body is what we have in common with other creatures that God created; our spirit is what we have in common with the Creator.

As we are intrinsically temple of the Holy Spirit, we no longer have any more needs of temples to encounter God; we need only to keep silence and exercise contemplation entering within ourselves.

Silence is able to dig an interior space within us, to allow God to dwell  there, in order that his Word rests in us, so that the love for Him takes root in our minds and in our hearts, and animates our lives. (Benedict XI)

Prayer cannot occur without silence, nor silence without prayer, one leads to the other. The daily practice of meditation has benefits in general, as much physical as psychological and spiritual. It reduces stress, high tension, helps in concentration, sleep, overcomes anxiety, asthma, cancer. Meditation is for the soul what exercise is for the body. There are no contraindications only benefits at all levels.

What is the truth?
(...) For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the Truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" John. 18:37-38

Since he does not wait for the answer, a rhetorical question, Pilate's statement is a bitter outburst of someone bored, who has not found the meaning nor comfort in the Greek and Roman philosophies and "modus vivendi" of the time. This same question was answered by Jesus to his disciples, when He showed himself to them as "the way, truth and life" (Jn. 14:6)

Jesus came to the world to testify to the truth, that is, to show men how to live the truth and in truth day-to-day. In this sense, since Christ is the truth, the gold standard of humanity, what it is to be authentically human, let us measure ourselves against Christ. Prayer, especially biblical prayer or "Lectio Divina", is in fact the act of measuring oneself against Christ.

To have Christ as the standard is to encounter truth in our lives; similar to connecting to a GPS that tells us where we are, what we are, where we should go, what we lack to get there and the path to take to arrive there.

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Mattew. 5:23-24

When we measure ourselves against Christ we not only encounter our truth at the individual level, but also our truth as members of a community. To pray, therefore, not only has the vertical dimension to love God but also the horizontal one to love the neighbour. When I encounter God I am made to know my deficits to love the neighbour because God always asks as he did with Cain, where is your brother? (Gen. 4:9)

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector". Luke. 18:10-11

There are also those who live in prayer and in participation of liturgical acts to self-justify their falsehood. The weak knowledge of themselves leads to a weak knowledge of God and vice versa. Without self-criticism there is no progress in spiritual life, these people live the religion like opium substituting self-criticism with self-justification.

My truth
When you see a giant, first examine the position of the sun, to make sure that it is not the shadow of a dwarf. (Von Handerberg)

God reveals himself to those who are in contact with their reality. Those who have a false image of themselves will also have a false image of God; such person lives outside of self, having lost contact within he also loses contact with God. Paraphrasing the statement by Hardenberg there are many dwarfs, who do not accept their reality, projecting on themselves the image of the giant they pretend to be. Often hiding and projecting, on this idealized and false image of themselves, that they begin to identify with it and truly believe that they are that shadow.

There are no superiority complexes, the bully and the proud, that come across as being superior, in reality others see through them and feel their inferiority; by not accepting this inferiority, they look to hide behind it, not only from others, but even from themselves; therefore they fill up with themselves, like the frog who wanted to be bigger than an ox, to fill the emptiness that they feel. If we are called to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit, we cannot fill up with ourselves; that's why God does not live in those who are not humble since they are full of themselves.

When we lose touch of our reality, our truth, we then also lose contact with God because God cannot relate to someone who does not exist. God can only relate with me, when I am in contact with my reality; when I am honest with myself, not excusing my sins nor hiding from myself my defects; when I am authentic, not concealing behind false images of myself.

To have a false image of myself lead to having a false image of God. The result is that I am not me, and God is not God. In this situation, prayer is not possible since I walk divorced from my truth.

"Deus intimior timo meo"
It is said that God wanting to be found with some degree of difficulty, consulted with his angels on the best place to hide himself from men. One angel suggested that he be buried in the bottom of the Earth, but God felt that sooner or later man would end up digging and find him.  In the depth of the ocean, suggested another angel, it was also no good as men will one day have the capacity to explore the bottom of the oceans and will easily find him. I know, God said to himself, I will hide myself within the heart of man, he will search in all places except there…

St. Augustine used to say that God is beyond my intimate being. Like Jules Verne, in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in order to get to God I need to undertake a journey of introversion to the centre of my innermost being and beyond. This is the reason prayer is an exercise of self-awareness and self-knowledge. Like God, human being is also a mystery to himself; the one who prays increases at the same time knowledge of himself and of God.

Knowledge of God and of ourselves are parts of the same process. It is not possible to know oneself without knowing God, nor know God without knowing oneself; because God is beyond me, and to reach him I need first to pass me by.

Yoga, Reiki, Zen and transcendental meditation
Buddha was Indian and a Hindu therefore trained and versed in polytheism and in paraphernalia of unlimited number of deities. The result of all this gave rise to Buddhism, a "religion", or better said an atheistic spirituality. Traditional Buddhism is a way of enlightenment, to reach a perfection of self and even selfishness, because it does not take into account others nor our relation with them.

Today in the western world Buddhism comes to us mixed with other philosophies, in the form of New Age religious syncretism. To the New Age, God is not a personal being but rather an energy, with which we can all participate. Man is only a particle of this energy, living in space and time. If God does not exist as a person then human being is also not a person.

It is true that for us this is wrong; God is much more than an energy, he is a spiritual and personal being. A being who searched always to reveal himself to Man, and in a limited way throughout the history of humanity he did just that, ending up becoming incarnate in the creature he created for greater understanding and interaction.

To discern the best attitude to take towards the spiritual practices of the Far East, we look as an example the reaction of the Church to Darwin’s theory of evolution of species. Pope Pius XII accepted Darwin’s conclusions, in his encyclical Humanae Generis, just as Darwin himself did because he was devout and continued to believe in God the Creator and Saviour after his discoveries. It is irrelevant whether God created the human being directly or thought of it at the end of an evolutionary process.

In this sense we can also dissociate from Buddhism practices and other spiritual practices of the far east of their atheistic philosophies or ideologies. "What does not kill fattens" says our people in their simplicity, and Jesus says "Whoever is not against us is for us" (Mk. 9:40)

During these holidays, with free time, we should seek help in these eastern techniques and not give ears to those, Christian fundamentalists and fanatics, who like to throw out the baby with the bath water.

We can excuse ourselves for not having attended a Sunday Mass because there was no Church at the top of the mountain or in the depths of the valley, in the fluvial beach or in the maritime beach where we find ourselves; but we cannot excuse ourselves for not having encountered God in Spirit and our own self in truth.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? I I ascend to heaven, you are there; (...) If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your right hand should hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night", even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. Psalm 139:7-12

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC