By Fr. Roy Cimagala
IN all our relationships, especially with God, the ideal condition to pursue and achieve is that of intimacy and ardor. While this would require tremendous effort and sacrifice, we should convince ourselves that pursuing it would be all worthwhile. Of course, we should not forget that we would need, first of all, God’s grace to be able to do it.
This condition should start first in our relationship with God, since all our other relationships would depend on it. To be intimate with God means to be fully identified with God’s will and ways, an identification that not only involves our spiritual powers of intelligence and will, but also our bodily powers, especially our feelings and passions.
It is this intimacy with God that would also fill us with drive, zeal and ardor to do things according to God’s will and ways. If our intimacy with God is real, it would inevitably lead us to be burning with zeal to do God’s will which is to love him and everybody else the way God loves everyone and everything.
To develop this intimacy with God, we need to exert the effort of nurturing the presence of God in ourselves, seeking and renewing the human devices that are so helpful for keeping a constant dialogue with him. We have to reach that point where we can truly say that we are saying affectionate words to him, praising, glorying and thanking him for everything.
We have to be wary of our tendency to simply go through the motions while doing some acts of piety. Our prayer should be a living encounter with God. This can be proven because such living encounter would unavoidably fill us with joy and peace despite all kinds of problems, setbacks, etc., that we may be experiencing at a given moment.
Besides, we would always be moved and motivated to do whatever we are doing in the best way we can. We would be driven with love that is not afraid to make sacrifices and is always generous in self-giving.
While this burning desire to do God’s will in the best we can would start in our mind and heart, we have to see to it that that ardor filters down to our senses and bodily parts, to our emotions, passions, memory and imagination.
Since in our piety there are things that we do often and regularly, like praying, going to Mass, etc., we need to see to it that our desire to show genuine love for God and others through these acts is maintained. We cannot deny that if we are not careful, we can easily fall into routine, and before we know it, we can appear to be more dead than alive when doing these acts of piety.
What can help is to repeat many times during the day many small acts of faith, hope and charity, in the form of spontaneous aspirations and ejaculatory prayers. They can serve as little twigs to maintain the waning embers of our piety if not to fan that dying piety into a bursting fire.
We really need to be always in this state of burning desire in spite of the condition of our body. As said earlier, it is first of all a matter of exercising our spiritual faculties to ask for the grace of fervent love. Let us hope that we know how to do this. We can only expect many good things that can come from this, in spite of the varying conditions and situations in our life, many of them, quite adverse to our spiritual health.
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