The inner man

We need to be more aware of our inner man, and more so of our duties and responsibilities toward that core of our being. I get the intuition that with all the rush of developments we're having, with their pressures and concerns, we are neglecting this fundamental aspect of our life.

The other day while reading the papers and going through cybernews, I noticed that while its understandable to package all these info outlets with pictures and stories of stars, celebrities, new products, etc., there's practically nothing about how all these items relate to our inner being.

They appear to cater only to our external and material needs. Nothing wrong there as long as they don't stop there either. This is the problem we are facing these days.

We are constantly massaged, tickled, stimulated in our outer layer, but somehow starved and left to atrophy in our inner self. This is a dangerous situation.

Our inner man refers to our spiritual life. To be aware of our inner man is to be a spiritual man, as opposed to an unspiritual or carnal man. St. Paul practically interchanges these two terms.

In his Letter to the Ephesians, he says: "According to the riches of his glory, may he grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." (3,16-17)

The immediate corollary of this passage is that our inner man ought to be fed by the Spirit of Christ. It should not be fed by any other pabulum. We are what the spirit in us is. We behave according to how the spirit in us moves us.

This truth is reiterated in St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. "The unspiritual man," he said, "does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

"The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one." (2,14-15)

Many practical conclusions can be derived from these words, all pointing to the importance of caring for our inner man or our spiritual self. We have to be wary of the strong and pervading tendency to treat ourselves simply in a physical or material sense, without going deep enough to our very core, our soul.

We cannot underestimate this danger. Nowadays, many people's idea of beauty, strength, success, triumph, for example, is stuck in the physical or economic level, measuring things in inches and in pesos and in popularity.

In late Pope John Paul II's words, we tend to assess ourselves in terms of "having" rather than in "being." That is to say, if we have more, then we are ok. We don't bother about being more, or being better as a person and ultimately as a child of God.

When our inner man is weak, we would be at the mercy of our biological hormones and would start acting like any animal, or we would become easy prey to passing fads, commercial or ideological propaganda, etc.

 We would fail to get hold of the objective essences of things that would determine our moral judgments and behavior. We would miss the proper values that are supposed to govern us. Instead of loving, we'd simply be using people and things.

 We actually would become dehumanized. The possibility of degrading ourselves is unique to us since we are thinking and free creatures. Other creatures do not have to worry about this possibility.

Of course, by the same reason, we are also capable of elevating and upgrading ourselves. In this, the sky is the limit, since with the help of grace we can never exhaust the possibilities of being God's children, created in his image and likeness.

We have to help one another in this business of taking care of one's inner man or spiritual self. We have to know the relevant doctrine, acquire the skills and the virtues. In short, we have to avail of the necessary formation, which actually is a continuing affair.

We need to help everyone keep one's true humanity, and to check the trend to empty ourselves of our inner man, leaving us with a plastic substitute, a façade, a mask, an empty suit, a scarecrow, and other manifestations of the unspiritual or carnal man.

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