Our daily resurrections

OUR Christian faith teaches us that there will be the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. That’s what we profess in the Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.”

This truth of our faith is supposed to be the consequence of the resurrection of Christ which signifies the completion of his redemptive work on our behalf. We too are supposed to take part of this resurrection, as long as we also take part of Christ’s death.

St. Paul teaches that to us very clearly: “If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall live also together with Christ.” (Rom 6,8)

This truth is not meant to take place only at the end of time. What is implied is that we need to live it in a daily basis. We can make use of our usual drama in life as a way to live out the very passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

In other words, our earthly day-to-day life becomes the precious time of rehearsal for the final and crucial moment of our death. Our death should be a dying with Christ so that we too can rise with him.

We need to be aware of this very important significance and purpose of our life here on earth, and to act on it accordingly. Everything that happens in our life can and should be related to this significance and purpose of our life. Nothing in our life, whether humanly good or bad, right or wrong, is irrelevant to our life’s purpose.

We should be wary of our tendency to degrade our life’s true and ultimate meaning and purpose. That happens when our understanding of our life’s purpose and our reactions to the different events of our life are derived simply from our human estimations of things, as from our senses and emotions alone, or from some sciences or philosophies or ideologies or superstitions.

With these attitudes and frame of mind, we put ourselves vulnerable to despair and helplessness, since we would not be able to cope with all the trials and challenges of life. We would be tying the hands of God who knows how to resolve even our most unsolvable predicaments.

We have to strengthen our faith, deepen it such that it is gives shape and direction to our thoughts, desires, words and deeds. Our faith is the beginning of God being with us, sharing what he knows and what he has with us, like the power to suffer all the consequences of sin including death, and to rise from the dead.

This great gift would be useless if we do not make use of it. Let’s be aware of it, study it and start to make use of it.

Our daily resurrections can be in the form of making many acts of contrition, of atonement and reparation. That is a way of dying to our sin in Christ, and therefore setting us to participate in the resurrection of Christ also. This cycle of dying and rising should be a permanent feature of our life.

It can also take the form of that attitude of simply having to begin and begin again in life, knowing that falls and failures are inevitable in life in spite of our best intentions and efforts. We should just have that holy stubbornness that would enable us to move on despite some persistent misery that can afflict us.

We should have the conviction that God is giving himself completely to us. There is nothing in our life that God in his all-powerful and merciful providence cannot make use of to attain his divine will for us, which is to bring us back to him.

All that we need to do is to open ourselves to God’s abiding interventions in our life and to cooperate with his work as best as we can. We may still have our limitations, we may still commit errors, but if everything is done in good faith, God our Father, ever loving and merciful to us, would know how to bring us back to him.

We therefore have every reason to be hopeful, to be at peace and to be cheerful. When we find ourselves sad and seemingly lifeless, it could mean that we have no faith in God, or nor living that faith to the full. It could mean we are not willing to die with Christ daily so as to rise with him also daily.