Unity amid diversity and errors

 We need to be more aware of our duty to establish, build up and strengthen the unity in our life. We only have one life, made up of many parts, aspects, stages and levels, and subject to all sorts of conditions, big and small, favorable and unfavorable, etc. The challenge is how to put all these things together in harmony.

Strengthening that unity of our life insures us that we would be on the right track toward the goal proper to us, that we would be effective in what we are doing, and healthy and resistant to anything that can weaken us or lead us astray.

Everyday we should be conscious that amid the mind-boggling diversity of conditions and circumstances defining our daily life, like the pressures and challenges we have to contend with, we are consistently working out this unity of life.

We have to avoid getting distracted or entangled by things that, while unavoidable and also important to us, do not comprise our ultimate end. We have to be wary when we get confused and disoriented, and succumb to the worldly appeals to be merely practical, influential, rich, famous, etc.

Thus, we need to have a clear idea of what would represent a distraction or swerving from the right path to take, because often we do not even know when are already getting distracted or entangled or confused.

There even are indications nowadays that point to the disturbing phenomenon that the wrong and immoral things are now considered all right. In fact, the distinction between good and evil, moral and immoral seems to be thinning beyond recognition. It's like the distinction is mauled by a lion.

All this means that we have to be clear with the belief that the source and end of the unity of our life is God. It cannot be any other. Working for our unity of life would depend on where our faith lies. Is it with God or simply with our own selves, our own estimation of things?

How important therefore it is to reinforce our life of faith, because with this respect to this particular issue, a vague and weak faith would certainly lead us nowhere in any effort to establish that unity.

With a weak or even missing faith, any appearance of unity we may be able to show in life would be grounded on shifting sand, not on terra firma. It would be a unity that cannot cope with all the demands unity requires, all the questions and issues it can raise.

A unity based only on social, political or economic grounds would not know what to do when the opposite of what we consider to be the ideal in these fields takes place instead. It's a unity that would not know how to cope with contradictions.

It's only with God as revealed fully in Christ and perpetuated by the Holy Spirit in the Church that even the defeats and losses, the pains and misfortunes that we suffer in this life can contribute, rather than undermine, the true unity we ought to seek, the unity based precisely on God.

As St. Paul said: “To them that love God, all things work together unto good…” (Rom 8,28) The same idea is reiterated in many of his epistles. “The weak things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” (1 Cor 1,27) “It's when I am weak that I am strong.”

The wisdom behind these words cannot be captured by any human estimation of what is good for us, of what can possibly contribute to building up our unity in our individual person and also among ourselves as a people.

The merely human criteria we may use to establish unity will always be vulnerable to the many contradictions and mysterious situations, the so-called crossroads, we are bound to meet in life.

At the moment there seems to be a trend to bash the Church because some people attribute a wrong notion of triumphalism to the Church. Any violation of this notion therefore forfeits the right of any Church leader concerned to say anything about faith and morals.

This attitude is, of course, unfair. Even Christ told his disciples that they may follow what the Jewish leaders were preaching though they should not follow what the leaders were doing, since they did not practice what they preached.

To build our unity, we need to know also, following the teaching of Christ, how to cope with our mistakes and failures.