State of preparedness

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
March 15, 2011

IT’S good that with the recent spate of calamities around the world, we are now talking seriously about how to achieve a state of preparedness. Many ideas have come out, obviously propelled by the best of intentions and supported by the best of technical details.

There’s just one thing that needs to be highlighted. In fact, it is the most important thing, since this aspect of preparedness is what integrates everything else and brings us over the inevitable things in this life and world to reach our final destination.

This is none other than our spiritual preparedness. Hardly anyone talks about this, I know, and it’s sad. And if ever it’s taken up, it most likely will be handled by a priest in a strictly religious environment or some weirdo who makes it a hobby to talk about the end of times.

This should not be so. I feel that everyone should be not only aware of this necessity, but should also do whatever he can to help the others attain this state of spiritual preparedness. In short, everyone should take care of his spiritual preparedness and should do all to make this concern widely discussed.

So far, the media have been quiet about this aspect of preparedness. They almost exclusively talk about technical and logistical items. That’s understandable. But in the end, we can only talk so much about these aspects. The state of spiritual preparedness should be the more mainstream concern among us.

No matter how exhaustive and scientific we are in the technical and logistical preparedness, we cannot avoid the disasters, the devastation and death itself that will surely come to us one way or another. We need something else that somehow will enable us to find meaning in these dark events and draw infinite good from them.

This is what spiritual preparedness does to us. It frees us from purely human fears and natural concerns, and gives us the confidence, based on truths of faith, that everything will be alright in spite of all the in spites of.

Our spiritual preparedness is what gives us the full picture of our life and destiny. We are no mere creatures of nature. We have been made in the image and likeness of God, elevated to be children of his in Christ.

Our spiritual preparedness takes us to a higher ground, giving us a glimpse of what is beyond our human horizons and natural limits. This is not to mention the corrections it will make to our inadequate if not erroneous understanding of our life here on earth.

It affords us an apocalyptic worldview, because it unveils and reveals, which is what apocalypse means, the true meaning and purpose of our life. In other words, with this kind of preparedness, anything can happen in the world, and we can still manage to come out safe and sound, in the ultimate sense of the words.

We have to make a race to reach this kind of preparedness, since, truth to tell, we are far behind the relevant passing grade. We seem not only to be in the primitive, stone age still in this regard, but also to dig in further in our ignorance, confusion and error.

In fact, there are instances when we seem to be taking the wrong path insofar as the spiritual preparedness is concerned. The other day, for example, I learned that US President Obama dared to brand the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

He is extending his defiance to basic natural moral law, that is, to God’s law about us. He is pitting our man-made legal system with the God-given moral law. This is courting God´s wrath.

This kind of event, for sure, has an effect on the over-all status of mankind. God is all merciful, but his goodness does not preclude the demands of justice and the possibility of divine retribution to correct, if not also penalize, our wrongdoings, especially the ones committed in massive scale.

We need to go back to God! We have to stop taking on a purely human itinerary in our life, since that will get us nowhere but much graver disasters and devastations than what apocalyptic movements in the earth, seas and skies can inflict.