Temperance, mortification, penance

These are important and indispensable needs in our life. Without them, we would live handicapped and disoriented. While we have to consider many requirements and face challenges in life, we should never forget to make an abiding self-examination with respect to these virtues.

 Let’s not be naïve. From our own personal weaknesses and errant, wild urges to the intoxicating temptations around, we have to contend with tremendous pressures to forget and neglect these virtues.

 Truth is we are pushed to get disengaged from God and from others, and to plunge headlong into self-love, which is actually our doom. In fact, we need special efforts to keep ourselves on course, on the right track in our relationship with God and with others.

 The media abet this situation. More mindful with profitability and popularity, they practically leave behind the finer demands of morality and spirituality. In fact, they deftly make use of legitimate values, like rights and freedom, rationality and practicality, and the ignorance and vulnerability of the people, to inject effects toxic to us.

 We now have, for example, the celebrity syndrome where physical beauty, talents, and accomplishments in the fields of sports, arts and theater, etc., are exploited to market frivolity, vanity, greed, sensuality, envy, etc. These may not be explicitly intended, but they come just the same, and those concerned just try to play blind.

 Today’s movies and TV shows now seem to aim at riveting and nailing our senses to the here and now, to the shallow and the pleasurable, to our untamed subliminal instincts, while starving our intelligence and our faith. 

 They seem to declare war against sobriety, serious thinking and pious believing. In short, they tend to bring out the animal or the savage and the pagan in each one of us. That seems to be their hidden agenda.

 Instead of making us more human, more of a person, more rational and spiritual, we are made to be more sensual and irrational, more of an object and target of immoral or at least amoral campaigns than a subject who is supposed to be free, intelligent, responsible and deserving respect always.

 It’s a wild, wild world out there in the media. I am afraid it will take time before things settle down. I am of the belief that what is wrong, unfair or immoral will sooner or later be corrected, perhaps only after so much blood, sweat and tears. I believe that immoral laws and practices will backfire and correct themselves in time.

 Meanwhile, it’s good that we cultivate the virtues of temperance and penance with their corresponding practice of mortification. They serve to put us on the ground, giving us sure footing and a good hold on reality, when we tend to fly into our fantasy world.

 Temperance, mortification and penance can do us a lot of good by purifying us and strengthening us spiritually and morally. They dispose us to enter into the deeper and wider reality of our faith. They give us a fuller picture of our life even as providing us also with life’s finer details.

 The spirit of penance, for example, shows us the true state of our human condition. And that is that we have been born in original sin which, though erased through baptism, leaves us with a scar of concupiscence, a certain attraction to evil that leads us to commit sin.

 Penance makes us feel the need to be contrite for our sins, to ask for forgiveness, especially through the sacrament of confession, and to make up for our sins, doing many acts of atonement and reparation.

 We should never leave this aspect of our life, together with its allied need for temperance and mortification, unattended. Everyday, along with our many legitimate human desires, plans and ambitions, we should plot out the concrete program of how to live and develop these virtues and practices.

 Let’s remember that our Lord clearly told us to enter by the narrow gate, and to avoid the big, wide one that leads to our perdition. He also told us that if we have to follow him, we need to deny ourselves and take up our cross.

 These indications should not remain in words or desires alone. They have to be lived if we truly want to lead an authentic Christian life, full of goodness, meaning and love for one another, whatever the circumstances may be.

Let’s see to it that no day should pass by without the cross. We need it like we need air.