Fr. Gabriel Becerra O. Diocesan Health Advisor.
Every person is a being in permanent search of the Good and the Truth. He has done it, does it and will do it in many ways and at all times.
By looking at the different cultures in the world, we can discover that innate desire of human beings: to search, to find, and to search again without stopping, almost insatiably.
That every person seeks the Good and the Truth, does not mean that he knows that Good and that Truth. We need to search, even though we don’t know what we are really looking for, but we intuit it, like the newborn child who is looking for his mother’s breasts, even though he “doesn’t know” (yet) that this fact will prevent him from dying or, more positively, that he will will give life
These instances that are part of our daily existence of sincere, honest and permanent search, although we do not know how to define it exactly, we will call it “Spirituality”. As a result of the different spiritual searches, some cultures are distinguished such as the Asian, the Indo-European, the Greco-Roman and those of the Middle East to name a few. In all of them there is a common denominator: the journey towards the interior of the human being and on the other hand the encounter and the presence of a Being different from the human being and the world.
It is the complex path of religion, which passed through the sieve of cultures, has given powerful answers to this search, in a mixture that gradually settles over time into two great protagonists: the creature and the Creator or humanity and divinity. . The first (creature) seeks the second (creator) to find answers and often identifies her with that Good and that Truth that she seeks so much in his existence. Therefore, the spiritualities of the different religions must be respected, they entail a singular cosmogonic vision (origin of reality or the world) according to the culture in which they live.
Christian spirituality – respecting other spiritualities – has a vision of reality that goes through some basic dimensions: the first is the analysis of reality, that is, I see, judge and act based on the conscience that we must not submit to absolutism, nor ideologies lacking in transcendence, nor to concepts of a fatalistic and subjectivist history. The Truth exists, it is the Christ of God. The second is to be able to illuminate reality, that is, the events and situations of life as a reflection of God who is Love and of his Word made flesh in history, knowing that in it there is sin and at the same time redemption in Christ. . And the third is the responsible assumption of reality, personal and social, as a commitment to permanent construction, showing that the human being is a gift from God, and in Christ we are all brothers.
So, respecting the ways of conceiving this search for Good and Truth, in the so-called Spirituality (es) of the different beliefs and in the Christian one in particular, we are called to respect reality, with the living desire to purify it of everything that is inhuman. and absolutist ideological impositions, to bring it closer to fullness and perfection in the relationship of brothers in charity, in respect for nature, in the vision of history with hope, and, fundamentally, to take care of the delicate expression of what transcendent or religious not as alienation (loss of identity) but as the maximum expression of a true humanity, subject to that Good and that Truth that we seek so much.