Coping with misery

Our human condition cannot avoid misery in one form or another. A quick look around would reveal cases upon cases of human misery blighting our world today. Poverty, hunger, ignorance, illness, injustice abound, their stench practically filling the air.

Beggars proliferate in the streets. Homeless families, with little children all dirty and practically naked, stay and sleep on sidewalks or under bridges and flyovers. Many moneyless sick and those with disabilities waste away in some public hospitals or in some corners.

There still are other forms of human misery that may not be immediately perceptible because they are more subtle and more complex. They hide behind the masks of wealth, fame, power, exuding an air of sophistication and adept in the ways of pretense and deceit, but they are there nonetheless, and in fact, are more disturbing, more dangerous, more pitiable.

In the face of all these, we need to learn what to think and do about them. We should not be casual and cavalier about them. We simply cannot depend on our spontaneous impulses, since these can take only the external aspects and miss the real issues, and can lead us to depression, to get scandalized and fall into self-pity, frozen into inaction.

This is where we have to have recourse to our core beliefs. If we do not have faith, then we would just be at the mercy of our instincts and impulses, our estimations of things, both personal and collective, of some social trends and political consensus, etc. These, at best, can give us only a tentative, partial view and some passing relief, but they can never totally cope with human misery.

Our Christian faith offers us a global picture of this phenomenon, explaining to us its origin and causes, its forms and ways, its remedies, both temporal and eternal, both immediate and ultimate.

We need to enliven this faith in this regard, so that even as we go through the unavoidable experience of human misery, we can still find meaning and hope in them, we can still afford to find peace and joy through them. In fact, we can still derive not only some good, but rather our true, ultimate good - our salvation.

That is why we need to know very closely the doctrine of our faith regarding evil and sin, the misuse of our freedom, our disloyalty to God, etc., to have a good idea of the causes of human misery. These indeed are the root causes of human misery.

Such knowledge would somehow calm down our worries about why human misery exists. It would lead us to focus our attention more on what to do with it. We avoid wasting time, simply feeling bad and lamenting.

Then we have to know how to deal with human misery. In this regard, we just have to look more closely at Christ. He showed us the way. He was full of compassion. If need be, he had to perform miracles, healing the sick, recovering the sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and even life to the dead.

These miracles only show that we too should be compassionate with one another, doing everything to solve whatever misery we have. Before having recourse to Christ for some extraordinary interventions as in some miraculous cures, we have to exhaust all human means to do this.

But he never failed to underscore the importance of faith in all this. That is why he always told the beneficiaries of his miraculous cures that it was their faith that made them merit such miracles. The unbelievers did not receive any miracles.

He neither failed to preach about the faith. It was as if he wanted to disabuse us from totally relying on our human and natural means, or on some stroke of luck and superstitious practices. The human and natural means, of course, are always necessary, but always at the instance of faith, and never without it. So we have to be careful because we tend to be held captive by human and natural means alone, if not by some superstition.

When all human and natural means have been used and still no relief is attained, Christ showed us how to about that predicament.

It is simply to bear everything, even up to death, because as long as we unite our suffering and death with his, we too can expect to resurrect with him.

Besides, our human miseries already have some beneficial effects. They tend to purify and strengthen us, and to lead our path toward God. These truths should always be in our mind as we go through our miseries.

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