From Prose to Verse

One shout-out students of the school where I work like to make during special events is “We do ordinary things extraordinarily well!” I feel good everytime they do that. But I also realize I have a tremendous task of explaining to them why it has to be that way, and more importantly, how to convert it from a mere slogan to a living reality.

We have always tried to impart to the boys that if they have the proper attitude and skills, they can easily convert the prose of their daily ordinary work and little duties into a verse of love for God and for everybody else.

They just have to learn to find Christ in everything they get involved in. That is the secret. And it can be done if first of all their faith and piety are strong and working. Obviously for that to happen, they need to overcome whatever biases they may have about the practicability of living by their faith in their ordinary activities.

We have to learn to find Christ in the little things which comprise most of our day, if not of our whole life. This is not a baseless assertion, an act of fantasizing, of hunting lions in the corridors of the house.

This is as real and true as can be. Of course, it requires faith, but if we care to listen to faith, we will, in fact, find it reasonable and practicable, not something quixotic, cocooned in the realm of the abstract, the absurd and the impossible.

Christ is God made man. As God, he is involved in our creation, in our getting into existence. As such, since its existence that is involved in creation, he cannot withdraw from us, since by doing so would be like God withdrawing our existence. Since we obviously exist, ergo, he is in and with us by the very fact of our existence.

As God and man, he is our redeemer, the one who, in a manner of speaking, would re-do or re-create us after our original state of humanity has been damaged by our sin.

As such, since we all need to be redeemed at all times, he neither can withdraw from us, since by doing so would be like this God-and-man, Jesus Christ, withdrawing from our redemption. Since we need to be redeemed always, Christ is also always with us. He actually cannot help but redeem us, because of his great love for us.

We need to be more aware of this reality about ourselves, since we often do not realize it, dominated as we are with the merely material and sensible realities and with what is the here-and-now and what is immediately felt. We many times fail to go beyond this level.

This is not to mention that our sins themselves make us insensitive to this reality which is also a truth of faith. And our sinfulness can be such that we would not even feel the need for conversion, thus putting ourselves in some state of invincible insensitivity to the truths of our faith.

This is the truth of faith that serves as the basis for our belief that Christ is also everywhere and all the time, and especially in the little ordinary events and circumstances of our day.

It’s in the little things, in the care we give to the small, ordinary, prosaic activities and concerns of the day that proves whether we are really true to our good intentions and to our fervent affirmations of love and care for the others.

We need to train ourselves to see Christ in the little things. The objective reality is that Christ as God is everywhere. He’s not only in the extraordinary events in our life. He is always with us.

Thus, we need to learn to be contemplative even in the middle of the world, able to see God in all the good, the bad, and the ugly that the world contains. We need to learn how to be recollected so that even as we engage our senses and faculties with the many immediate things in life, we don’t lose sight of the ultimate end.

We need to exercise our faith. We cannot depend solely on what we see, hear or feel. Neither would it be enough that we move only when we understand things. We have to follow closely what our faith tells us, even if there are mysteries involved.

God’s providence is such that not only is he present in everything. He is also actively intervening in our life, especially in the little things, drawing us and everything else to himself.