By Fr. Roy Cimagala
THAT is actually what we are meant to do all our life here. It corresponds to our duty to give what is due to God, our Creator and Father, as we go through the ups and downs of our life here on earth. That is how we can manage to be happy, serene and confident despite whatever. That’s simply because glorifying God constitutes the best act of love we can give God.
Indeed, it is the best condition we can have in this life. To be able to glorify God presumes that we have been able to identify ourselves with God in his will and in his ways as revealed fully in Christ, the Son who became man to save us, offering us the way of how to be with God in spite of our limitations, mistakes and sins. It is in this condition that we can attain our supreme joy and our total fulfillment.
It corresponds to what St. Paul once said, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor 10,31) And the ultimate foundation of that assertion is because the purpose of our creation is none other than to give glory to God. In fact, the ultimate purpose of the whole of creation is to give glory to God, its creator. There is no other reason why God chose to create instead of just being by himself.
Glorifying God can only signify that we are giving everything to him, everything in our life that includes not only the good things but also the repented bad and negative things all the way to our death.
It is an act of total self-giving and submission to him who is everything to us. Through it, we empty ourselves completely to fill ourselves only with God. It is where we unite ourselves to him completely and share in his own glory.
This act of glorifying God presumes that we do it out of love, out of freedom, and of total gratuitousness that corresponds to God’s total and gratuitous love for us.
Let’s remember that God himself through Christ has to empty himself by becoming man, out of sheer love for us. This is the language of love. One empties himself to fill himself with his beloved. We achieve this self-emptying and God-filling when we manage to glorify God.
Glorifying God is not an expression of selfishness on the part of God. He does not need that. He is the fullness of being already. But by giving glory to God, we make ourselves, and the rest of creation, to participate in God’s glory. That’s when we achieve the best and ultimate dignity we can ever have.
We need to be most conscious of this duty and do all we can to carry it out in every act we make, whether it is physical, mental or spiritual, etc. The big problem we have today is that instead of giving glory to God, we tend to give glory to ourselves, thinking that it is where we will find our joy and fulfillment.
That’s when we fall into vainglory that can come to us in many and very subtle ways. It can only be a false glorification of ourselves and a very deceptive one that can give us some degree of joy and pleasure but is actually setting us for a bigger and graver fall.
We have to be wary of this danger. Instead, we have to see to it that we are conscious in truly giving glory to God in all that we do and in any situation that we may find ourselves in, whether such situation is happy or sad, good or bad in human terms.
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
