From prose to verse

THIS is the constant challenge we have to tackle. How should we convert the prose of everyday into a verse that can penetrate eternity, the forever? The secret, of course, is love. The love that comes from God, is energized by him and is directed to him. It has to be patterned after the love of Christ, the fullness of God’s revelation to us. He was the one who commanded us to love as he himself has loved us. (cfr. Jn 13,34)

We have to be wary of our tendency to only take care of the technicalities of our daily routine if only to achieve some earthly goal. Nothing wrong with that. Except that if not inspired by God’s love, such tendency would just be an exercise in futility since it would not bring us to our eternal goal. It would just keep us in the temporal and material world, not the forever.

To convert the prose of our daily life to a wonderful, love-inspired verse, we need to realize that we have to start everything with God and end it with him also. We need to refer everything to God.

This may be awkward at the beginning. But if we spend some time to meditate on the whole reality of our daily routine, we cannot help but realize that God ought to be the beginning and end of it all, the Alpha and the Omega. (cfr. Rev 22,13)

Everything comes from him and everything belongs to him. In our case as human beings with intelligence and will, we ought to realize that we not only come from him and belong to him. We are meant to share in the very life and nature of God, since we have been created in God’s image and likeness.

We are much more than just any ordinary creature. We, together with the angels, are God’s masterpiece in the entirety of his creation. This is how our Catechism describes this truth of our faith:

“Of all visible creatures only man is ‘able to know and love his creator.’ He is the ‘only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,’ and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life…” (356)

It is good, of course, to know who we really are, so we also would know how to behave in a manner proper to our objective dignity. Our life—and everything in it, including our daily routine—cannot but be a life meant to know and love God. Even while here on earth, immersed in our temporal and earthly affairs, we are meant to be with God and with all things out of love for God.

Of course, the conversion of our daily prosaic and banal routine into something special that can only be driven by love does not exempt us from attending to the technicalities of our tasks. In fact, love would urge us to attend to them with utmost attention. But love would make the whole operation lovable and meaningful. Even in our tedious work, we can experience a lightness of heart.

Again, the secret is to be constantly aware of who we are and of how much God loves us. In other words, our life is always a life with God. In that way, we would always realize that our daily activities, no matter how prosaic, can and should have eternal value.

In this regard, we cannot overemphasize the need for us to develop a contemplative spirit and to maintain our spiritual and supernatural bearing all the time. We should not allow ourselves to be swallowed up only by temporal and earthly goals which, while having their legitimate value, only have a relative role to play as means, occasions and reasons to love God.

Let us help one another to learn how to turn the prose of our daily life into a meaningful and beautiful verse, dripping with love.