Adjusting our settings

WITH the rapid developments nowadays, especially in the fields of the sciences and technology, we need to adjust our personal settings, and later on our collective settings, so as not to lose our proper bearings as we go through the new experiences, insights and challenges provoked by these advances.

By proper bearings we mean that God ought to be the foundation, the measure and the end of everything that we do and accomplish in this life. This fundamental truth is slowly and steadily being eroded, such that God seems to be nowhere to be found in our so-called pursuit for progress.

In fact, there is an emerging trend to outgrow the need, even the mention of God. Some people have already gone to the extent of getting hostile to any reference to God, faith and religion in their mundane pursuits. It’s as if God does not only have any place I these human endeavors. God has become an enemy to man’s effort to mature.

By adjusting our settings we mean that we have to find ways to develop and maintain a supernatural outlook even as we go through our temporal and worldly affairs. We should still manage to pray, to see God in everything even as we handle the most technical details in our march to world development.
We should still be able to relate everything, especially our secular concerns and activities, to God and his providence. We should still know how each earthly concern of ours plays in the over-all plan of God for the whole universe. Tremendous, overwhelming? Indeed! But that just happens to be how things ought to be.

This is now a crying need because what may have worked before in the times of the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles, the Church fathers, the holy men and women in the medieval times and the Renaissance, etc., may not work anymore today, what with a significantly different set of circumstances and challenges we have at present.

To be sure, there are needs, methods, processes and ways that will never change irrespective of the changing circumstances. To mention a few, the need for a time for prayer, meditation and contemplation will never be obsolete. The same with the need for study, recourse to the sacraments, the continuing development of virtues, etc.

But we have to make the appropriate changes given the fact that people nowadays are more mobile, more engaged in secular affairs even as the world itself has become more scientifically and technologically sophisticated. We have to learn how to connect this state of affairs to God, to our spiritual and supernatural end.

We have to make the appropriate changes in mentality and, yes, even in spirituality. The Church has recognized this need, especially by convoking the Vatican II that plunged into the business of “aggiornamento” (updating) in the Church.

Thus, what is now known as the “lay spirituality” was succinctly defined and described. The nature and character of the Church, its relation to the world, its liturgy, etc. have been redefined, not in the sense of changing the essentials but of adapting the Church to modern circumstances and vice-versa.
This effort at adjusting and adapting done by the Church in the institutional level has to filter down to the different aspects, dimensions and levels of life, down to the very personal and individual level.
This is a tricky process, of course, to say the least. But it has to be done, encouraging everyone to contribute whatever he can in the process. To distinguish what is essential and therefore unchangeable and what is incidental and therefore can be changed is not easy at all.

Nothing less than divine inspiration is needed here, a divine inspiration that is as much as possible to be corresponded to by us promptly, correctly, generously, heroically.
Just the same, I feel that we have enough guidelines to put us in the right track in this effort. These are guidelines gathered from the gospel, Church teachings, the different charisms in the Church, the personal and collective experiences of the people, etc.

Offhand, what I can say is that with our new technologies, we now have readily available to us different apps that can facilitate our prayer, our spiritual reading and doctrinal study, our personal and collective apostolate, etc.

Spiritual and church life need not be confined anymore to some chapels, churches, specialized centers. They now can be pursued and lived in the street, in the middle of the world.
This is a terrific development that we should make maximum use of. We have to adjust our settings accordingly.