Never ignore Christ

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
October 14, 2015

I JUST learned about the Tambuli Awards, organized by the University of Asia and Pacific (UA&P), that seeks to promote both business and societal values of marketing communications campaigns.

That’s actually another way of saying that advertisements and commercials can work not only for reasons of profit but also for strengthening human and Christian values in society.

I have seen the winning entries of the past years, and indeed, I can say that if only we put our mind and heart into it, we actually can be very creative and entertaining in the right way, avoiding gimmicks and smart moves that only foster erotic and frivolous features.

Bluntly speaking, I must say that given the prevailing business culture we have nowadays, the awards are a bold initiative to consciously put Christ in the middle of the unavoidable business of product publicity and promotion.

It’s acknowledging Christ in the market without need for apologies, since Christ – to make an understatement – has a rightful place in this particular business of ours.

Otherwise, we would just be left with our own devices, and no matter how brilliant they are, they will never fully satisfy the demands of our dignity. We would just be playing games, perhaps generating a lot of excitement but with hardly any lasting effect on who we really are.

I feel that we need to do this kind of thing, since at the moment the business world seems to be held captive almost exclusively by purely market principles and economic laws, like those of supply and demand, ratings, etc.

That kind of environment steadily leads us to our own dehumanization, since with it we end up simply ruled, titillated would be the better term, by worldly values that hardly touch the core of our being persons.

Yes, we have been made in the image and likeness of God, raised to the dignity of children of God and supposed to be governed always in truth and love as shown by Christ himself.

As persons, we are a relational being, meant for having constant dialogue with our Creator and among ourselves, and for the task of building ourselves up both individually and collectively, but always in the context of God who reveals himself in Christ made present in us now through the Holy Spirit.

As persons, we cannot help but be a religious being, that is, one with a relation with God, his Creator. As persons, we cannot help but treat others in truth and love, in charity, and not just as objects and motives for making money. We go beyond what numbers simply recommend.

These are truths that we need to release to the public arena, not confined in some specialized centers of learning, since they are meant for all and not just for some. They may not be immediately understood, appreciated and accepted, but they at least have to be known.

We need to break the secularist or pagan mold that has been gripping us for centuries as a result of the French Revolution of Enlightenment that put reason as the main if not the sole guide in our life, discarding faith, religion, God.

We have to make that mentality history, a thing of the past, a source of precious lessons about what to avoid in our pursuit for personal maturity and social and economic development.

For this, we need to put religion vitally and organically connected to our earthly affairs, since that would better reflect the kind of reality that we live in. It’s not a matter of establishing a theocracy, or of confusing Church functions with state affairs.

We have to respect the distinction between the material and spiritual, the mundane and the sacred, the temporal and the eternal, but we need to learn to see the relation between them also, since they are not separate aspects in our life. In short, religion has to permeate all areas of our life here.

Much of the problem we have at the moment is that we degenerate the distinction of these unavoidable aspects of our life into division and conflict among them. When we do business or politics, the usual mindset is that we have to leave Christ behind.

Acknowledging Christ in our human affairs would in fact enhance the evolution of these affairs of ours. Christ would encourage us to go for the truth, for justice, for understanding and broadmindedness, etc.