Educating our senses

IT’S important that we realize the abiding need to educate our senses, that is to say, to make our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and hand discern the ultimate object and purpose of our life, who is God.

They should not be allowed to go every which way, led simply by the impulses of our hormones, instincts and the many unclear trends in the environment. They have to be guided by our higher faculties of intelligence and will that in their turn should also be guided by faith, hope and charity.

Or said in another way, unless our senses are trained to see God in everything, they will just be stranded and entangled with the material qualities of things. We would just be trapped in the world of the material or at most the social, cultural, historical and other conditionings. And this predicament can get so bad that we would find it impossible to detect anything spiritual, much less, supernatural in the things around.

While the immediate object of our senses are the material and physical things, they should be made to find God in everything. After all, behind all these material and physical things is God always, since God is their creator and with his abiding providence he is always behind everything in the physical world, directing things to himself.

This is going to be a big challenge because the prevailing world culture today laughs at this fundamental truth of our life. Linking shape and color, sound and smell, taste and feel with God—is that ever possible? Modern people would ask.

Precisely because of this problem, big as it is, we have a great need to coax our senses and their respective organs to discern God in everything.

Christ’s words, “Seek first the kingdom of heaven and everything else will be given to you besides,” are not meant to involve our spiritual powers of intelligence and will alone. They are meant to involve the whole totality of our humanity, including our senses and emotions.

We have to avoid making dichotomies in our life and pursue the task of building up unity and consistency in our life. Yes, there are distinctions to be made, since we are made of different parts, and our life have different aspects, but our life is supposed to only one. We should build up, protect and defend that unity of life.

Our piety should also be lived in the very concrete details of our life that are first apprehended by our senses before they are “processed” by our intelligence and will, and later by the supernatural gifts of faith, hope and charity. We have to acknowledge the unity among those levels of our way of knowing and loving that enter into our piety.

We cannot just be intellectual in our piety, because that would make piety abstract. We have to involve the senses. If Christ is only acknowledged in our intelligence and will and not in our senses, we cannot go far in our relationship of love with him.

We need to educate our senses and feelings, purifying them of their usual limitations that apprehend only the externals of things without going to the essence of things and their proper origin and end, who is God. This is when our senses would be properly used. This is when we protect them from superficialities, errors and deformations. This is when they are made to serve God and our true good.

When this happens, the senses and feelings and their accompanying components actually enjoy a sublime, exquisite joy and sense of beauty. They would be rescued from a shallow and cheap kind of pleasure that is actually dangerous to us.

When this happens, the senses and feelings actually sing and dance, completely unburdened by any load of concern even as they continue to be mindful of the reality of life that surely would include problems and other negative elements. They would know how to deal with them, living a certain kind of sportsmanship, detachment and abandonment so indispensable in our life.

Unfortunately this sublime joy and beauty experienced when the senses relish their true freedom, and not the bogus one, is hardly known by many people nowadays. It will take some massive and heroic effort to reverse and correct the situation.

That’s why great attention has to be given in forming the young children in the right use of their senses, feelings, imagination and memory. It is necessary that this aspect be taken care of, since these elements enter into the building up of their character that more or less, defines their whole life.