My personal definition of a Universalist is, he/she is a person who is not bounded by any belief system. Radically, a person of this kind is called an iconoclast. Judging from the initial and very raw information I got from my officemates who conducted the research-interviews, I could already see the BIG difference between me and him (as I am also a self-declared Universalist). What is our big difference? It’s SELF-MASTERY!
I truly feel every pain he is feeling as I am also a parent. His problem is his inability to see things clearly and objectively because he chooses to be consistently bounded by his “fear of the unknown”. He is so overpowered by his anxiety of what the future may bring to his only child. For a self-confessed womanizer, this resulting fear is normal to happen because paranoia is but a natural effect of neurosis.
In my personal choice of religion there is a line that goes during the Doxology in the Holy Eucharist: “…keep us away from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope…”. This line I so appreciate despite the words that follow because wala naman kasi talagang perfect sa world na ito eh. If this world is perfect, then, imperfect as we are, we are not fit to live here. It is, for me, enough to believe in Jesus’ words: “do not worry.”
I believe that when Jesus Christ redeemed us by His precious blood, we have been cleansed of every sin. We became pure again. And during His resurrection when He promised to be in each one of us, He is indeed, through the Holy Spirit. He has to verbalize the Promise because He knows how easily we yield to temptations, so we commit sins. He has to stay in our heart because, humans as we are, our mind is easy to corrupt. So that it is really all up to each one of us to save our self every time we fall to temptation, thus, because He is just there inside of us, our every heart, waiting for us to be recognized. This is my simple understanding of “…the coming of our Savior.” (aside from, of course, Jesus’ BIG COMING BACK!) It is always by choice that we save our self and rise up again. Our continuous resolve is to always better the next time…or else we become bitter. Joke!
A universalist whose Faith is shaken by his own thoughts is in grave danger – of death (kaya grave). When we trust our own self as our source to solving the problem that bothers us, it is an indirect suicide – we kill our spirit little by little by so doing. What’s worse, we involve others in the plunge.
There is a lot to understand about our own self first. Without self-mastery, it is impossible for us to clear up our mind, see things at a vantage point, understand others, find peace and tranquility, and attain flexibility to be able to adapt effectively to life and living. For sometime we, my close friends and I, had a joke regarding people who thought for themselves as “very self-reliant” people: “ta, patay, diri maiha magbabalyo gud iton ngaran – diri ngani Brenda, Manda (referring to “brain damage” or off to “Mandaluyong”, where the National Mental Institute is located, respectively)!” Maybe even, God Forbid, the worst case scenario recently – that of Gen. Angelo Reyes’ suicide. God bless his soul!
It is very important, a MUST in fact, that we gain self-mastery if we claim to love our self. To love our own self is to take care of our own soul. We must choose the soul our priority over the body because only then can we understand what and how it is truly to love.
The yearning of the soul is always to Love – or to God – because He created us out of His Love for us (kaya Siya ang source of all good). That is why it is very important to emphasize in our belief system that “God is Love”. It is through the reclaiming of the soul where we can see and regard one another as souls, not mere flesh, and thus, need to be respected and yes, loved.
If we go back to our discussion of the anthropologist, Ms. Fisher, who found out and discussed the reasons in her book WHY WE LOVE, nowhere can we find love in our neuro-chemical triggers that are causing the hormonal secretion for our alleged “loving”. She made mention that humans have lust, romance, and attachment – these, we interpreted as “love”. These findings are very clear indications that Love is really situated in our heart – where Jesus is waiting. The great confusion is precisely the effect of our mediocrity, our simplistic thinking. So the price we pay for the great confusion is also great – to the grave gud!
In Jesus we are made to understand by God about His power. Our search for power is ended by it. Through it we finally settle in humility, having seen and understood much the mysteries of life on earth. We give up the things that do not really matter in the realization that it is only Love that matters after all. Unless we have done that, however we claim to be universalists, nobody will understand what we mean when we say the word because we do not understand it our self. We have to live what we say. It is only by so doing that we can get our message across.
Cultural differences are clear indications of our separation or division as brothers and sisters in one big family of God. If they say that both religion and politics are the reasons of the warring of the world, then we must resolve it by both: going beyond religion and; redirecting our resolve by adopting that “the political is personal” (Gloria Steinem, REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN). Howard Gardner’s MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES also made mention about the importance of that, when he mentioned about personal relationships, both intrapersonal and interpersonal.
The avoidance of confronting our personal issues always leads us eventually to unhappiness and failure because wherever we are led by our destiny we will not escape to be with others. We will always co-exist, as we are made for one another.
I had been smitten by the study and findings of Dr. Brian Weiss about reincarnation. I am not at all, however, disregarding my old concept of hell, as I still question the destiny of the souls of the people who se mortal sins have not been truly repented before death. For this reason, I am really dying to read and gather more information about it – reincarnation. The way I see things right now, I am convinced that the idea that “we live in circles” goes up and down, meaning, both in this world and the metaphysical world. We live; we die; we live again; we die again and; on and on the cycle keeps repeating, only because we refuse to learn our lessons. So, the big question is: when are we finally going to learn?
Maybe then, the best intervention to be able to really help is to teach people the need to be good. However mediocre our intervention maybe, at least, we gave or did our best. Receptivity is difficult to capture, usually because of pride, that without it we can never get to the bottom of the real problem.
“Life is difficult.” goes the opening salvo of one of Dr. M. Scott Peck’s THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED trilogy. When my seminarian son went, to take up his pre-college study, in a “far-away-from-home” the first time, his home-sickness was so overpowering that I had to remind him that, if he has to follow Jesus Christ – as His disciple – then he has to also be like Him – a citizen of the world!
Emotionality is one of the evil forces’ ploys to get us to join them. It is merely in our head. It stems from our insecurity that was caused by losing our trust usually when we were kids (at least for the majority. Me? I was broken hard emotionally at age 17). And there are numerous varying reasons why we lose our trust and confidence. We need to find out our uniqueness for us to find out how to hit the right target.
Og Mandino (THE GREATEST SALESMAN IN THE WORLD Part II) tells us that “we each have our own curriculum to follow.” Unlike in school, where there is a different set of curriculum for every particular course to be followed by the student-enrollees, life does not offer the same. My curriculum is distinctly designed for me alone, and yours is yours. This applies for each of us. That is why we need to re-parent our own self. Check everything out starting from the earliest memories. It is by re-parenting our self that we can take hold back again our happy childhood, despite whatever age we are in at the moment. To re-parent our self is to repair what went wrong, by understanding and accepting that “we need to be broken to become whole again”. Remember, education is life itself (John Dewey); but there is a great need to add spirituality to it to make it a “true education” (Ellen Gould White: EDUCATION).
With that, let me end this by quoting Jesus Christ – the true Teacher: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (The Gnostic Gospels)
Hanggang sa susunod… kitakits! Happy hearts’ day! God bless everyone!
