Our life in public
By Fr.
ROY CIMAGALA,
roycimagala@gmai.com
July 22, 2016
WE need to give due
attention to this aspect of our life. Our life in public is an
integral and unavoidable part of us.
In the first place, to be
born we need to have parents and a family, then a community, a school,
a market, a church, etc. We can never be alone. Our life is at once
private, individually ours, and public, always with others, if not
physically then at least intentionally.
Thus we need to know the
purpose of our life in public, what it involves, what it requires,
what duties we have toward it, what benefits it can give us and what
dangers it can pose.
I think that as we develop
fast because of our technologies, we have to know how to pull the many
levers at hand to reach our proper goal.
For example, how do we
handle the many inter-generational and inter-cultural demands of our
times? Our public and social life now has certain complexities unknown
before. It now is much more diverse. And we need to master them, and
not be their slaves or pawns.
It’s a pity to see many
people, especially the young, getting lost in the dizzying swirl of
our life in public. Many of us are left badly equipped to tackle the
intricacies involved. There’s the pressure of the peers and “barkada,”
the pull of the mob, the lure of the entertainment world, the tricks
and ambitions of business and politics, etc.
We often get stuck in the
externals and appearances without getting into the essence of things.
Our reactions are mainly knee-jerk and Pavlovian. We hardly think, we
barely reflect and study things.
We generate a lifestyle
based mainly on feelings and impressions, often fleeting and unstable,
rather than on one that has a solid foundation, able to guide us
consistently through the different phases and situations of our lives.
As a result, we enter into a
spiral of a worldly way of life with barely any soul in it. We begin
to treat each other merely as facades or masks, quite plastic.
Pretensions and hypocrisy become salient features of our society,
begetting the other forms of deceit and conceit.
Instead of being persons, we
become simply as actors, performers or robots. Our heart is slowly
turned from flesh to stone. We become users, manipulators and
exploiters of others. The others become mere objects, products,
statistics.
Subjectivity, where respect
for everyone’s spiritual character and personhood should be enhanced,
ebbs away. Instead, objectification of persons takes place, drying us
up to make us things instead of persons.
The dynamics created by this
set-up allows people to swing from self-absorption to self-assertion,
from self-seeking to self-promotion. Thus, the truly human ways to
link us into communion with others start to disappear. It’s all about
the ego. The “we/us” vanishes.
The field gets littered with
the remains of envy, greed, lust, sloth and other capital sins. And,
sad to say, there are many exploiters and predators in this field who
take advantage of the situation and the vulnerability of the weak and
the gullible. We need to expose them and their tactics.
We have to put a stop to
this vicious cycle, and reverse it to become a virtuous cycle. This
will depend on whether we first establish and strengthen our personal
relationship with God.
We have to be most wary of
the rise of secularism and relativism in society. They come as a
result precisely of setting God aside from our life in public.
And so, we can see in many
countries today delicate moral issues that need to be resolved very
clearly: abortion, confusion about sexual identity and human nature,
divorce, disconnection of science and technology from morality, lack
of respect for freedom of conscience, questionable educational thrusts
in schools, etc.
These issues are slowly
invading our shores, and we just have to strengthen our faith,
especially that of our leaders, for this eventuality.
Faith and religion are
always involved in these issues. While these issues have to be
considered under many aspects, we have to understand that the
considerations of faith and religion, being so basic in us, should be
given priority.
It’s in our faith and
religion that the fundamental and ultimate meaning of the issues are
given. It’s where our ultimate common good is determined. The
practical, the legal, the social, cultural and historical aspects have
to somehow defer to them.
Contrary to some views,
being consistent to one’s faith and religion in public office does not
make him a fanatic, a fundamentalist or detached from reality. Quite
the opposite is true.