Malice, morals, mercy

With the way the world is now, there is great need to return to God, which is an act of the will before it becomes an affair of our intelligence and then of our emotions, feelings and passions and all the other aspects and dimensions of our life.

This is simply because without God who is our Creator, the author, foundation, and standard of reality, both of the physical and spiritual kinds, the natural and moral, we would be left to our own estimation and devices that no matter how brilliant and practical cannot fully cope with the fullness of things.

We would be at the mercy of our limitations, weaknesses and faults that can easily lead the way to malice, sin and chaos, and all their usual company, like envy, greed, lust, pride, avarice, conflicts, etc.

Only with God would we know what is true and not true, what is good and evil, what is fair and not fair, etc. Without him, we may know the technical aspects of many things, but we would most likely miss their ultimate value and purpose. The things we discover, invent, use and enjoy would become a function only of our own motives and intentions that can be quite subjective and self-serving.

Let's hope that we can be clear about this point. It is God who has the last say, not us, because in the first place God has the first say, not us, about anything in our life and in the world.

We have to remember that we are constituted as creatures of God, made in his image and likeness, adopted children of his, who need to live our lives always in union with our Creator, and never by our lonesome.

If this radical and fundamental truth about ourselves is not accepted, then we would be starting to explore our life and our world on our own. Life then becomes exclusively what we make out of it.

Our autonomy and freedom should never to be taken as having nothing to do with God, or as simply a function of our own will. These are gifts of God to us, endowed to our very nature, so that we can truly be God's image and likeness. They simply cannot be used without God as their source and end.

We have to understand then that our autonomy and freedom need God. We have to feel that need, and given the way we are, especially considering our present condition that is weakened by sin, we need to cultivate the urge to feel that need, because this need does not come to us automatically in the way it should be.

Our weaknesses and sins, our laziness and malice can deaden what is actually our natural longing for God. We have to constantly fight against these weaknesses and sins.

Fighting them is first of all a matter of going to God. We cannot fight them simply on our own. If our first parents, who were created already in the very superior state of original justice, managed to fall into sin, how much more us, who already have been weakened by our sins!

We need to make constant acts of humility, deliberate reminders that we are nothing without God, because without this prerequisite there is no way we would go to God for help.

We would have no other recourse but to rely simply on our human devices that can never be completely freed of malice or certain self-serving calculations, or we simply abandon things in the way of fatalism and not in the providence of God.

It's with humility that we can entrust ourselves with God's will and ways even as we confront many situations in life where we can fully understand how things are. Even if we commit mistakes, as long as we are with God, things in the end will just turn out right.

St. Paul reassured us so. "For those who love God, all things will work out for the good." It's with this conviction that we can go through life with peace and joy, with confidence and security, that in turn would enable us to move on in spite of difficulties, mistakes and failures that we can commit.

Our moral life can manage to move along the lines of God's providence. Any mistake we make, even those that would go unnoticed by us, would still play along the all wise game plan of God's providence.  God is full of mercy. As long as we rid ourselves of malice and trust completely God instead, everything would just be fine.

Email: [email protected]