Waking up to reality

Ernesto Mondoñedo

IN MANY respects, modern man is the personification of progress. Within his lifetime, he has put together the know-how and the skill to build for himself and his posterity a veritable paradise of luxury and ease. He is surely acquiring some mastery of the world of persons and things.

Abetted by science and the deft hands of technology, modern man has relentlessly opened new frontiers of learning. He is probing the sub-microscopic world of the atom and is swinging out to the upper reaches of space. He can duplicate some of life’s processes and even create electronic “geniuses” to facilitate his incursions into the secrets of nature and automate veritable facsimiles of live human beings. He is bridging interplanetary travel with powerful rockets and inter-galactic distances with electronic telescopes. But not all is well with him.

The man of progress is in a night of harrowing crises, and symptomatically in the world of his relationship with his fellowmen.

Modern man indeed lords it over everything and everyone, but the inner forces of his own self have remained an enigma to him.

Must he destroy in order to build; and even kill in order to live? Must he cut completely from the past in order to be contemporary? How much is enough? How free is human freedom?

So stupefying are the uncertainties of his very existence that another atomic holocaust could be a merciful coup de grace to his desperate days. And with characteristic distrust of one another, he shuts himself into the narrow world of self only to run into his insatiable drive for wealth, recognition, and the cult to his ego. And when he wakes up to the futility of a self-centered existence, he finally plunges in utter despair into the nirvana of drugs and self-destruction.

Rays of Hope

Dark as the horizon may seem for humankind, rays of hope still shine ever so brightly. Given the vision of a greater good and encouraged by the company of others, some have worked themselves out of the raging storms of human conflict. They have begun to realize that precisely because of their facility for helping themselves to the ever-dwindling riches of the Earth; they cannot afford anymore to live as islands unto themselves.

Finally, fresh insights from the Second Ecumenical Council of Vatican (Vatican II) have revived hopes in the Christian Revelation of the empowering union of humans with their God in Christ.

Man, it seems, has long passed thru the threshold into a “New Age” where he could find greater life in losing his own to a divinely empowered and empowering society of God and man.

As I see it, the New Age is a divinely vibrant Christianity that shed the light of truth from living testimonies of authentic Christians more than from mere mouthing of Christian ideals and idealism. It delivers relief from hell this side of heaven thru domestic, or neighborhood, Church communities that God helps them to build and empower so they can grace their members with divine ways and means to follow in the footsteps of their humanly divine Leader.

As a well known charismatic leader puts it: The problem with today’s Christianity is that even the most Catholic countries are still not Christian. Not many more than one in a hundred Catholics who claim to believe in Christ knows who He really is: the God with them and God’s personal message and messenger of their salvation from the hell of this life and the next.