DON’T GO ABOUT HALF- ASLEEP
One of the dangers that threaten us today is to fall into a life that’s superficial, mechanical, routine, piled-up… It’s not easy to escape. With the weight of the years, many people’s projects, goals and ideals end up burning out. More than a few end up getting up each day to «just get by».
Where to find a start that’s humanizing, that gets us out of our alienation, that is capable of freeing us from superficiality, overcrowding, confusion or inner emptiness?
It’s surprising the insistence with which Jesus speaks of being watchful. One could say that he understands faith as a vigilant attitude that frees us from the meaninglessness that dominate so many men and women, who walk through life without goals or any objective.
Accustomed to living faith as a family tradition, an inheritance or just one more custom, we aren’t capable of discovering the force that it has to humanize us and give a new meaning to our lives. That’s why it’s sad to observe how many men and women abandon a faith that’s lived out unconsciously and hardly responsibly, in order to adopt an unbelieving attitude that’s just as unconscious and hardly responsible as their former position.
Jesus’ call to vigilance calls us to wake up from the indifference, passivity or carelessness with which we frequently live out our faith. In order to live it lucidly, we need to know it more profoundly, confront it with other possible attitudes of living, be grateful for it and try to live it out with all its consequences.
Then faith is a light that inspires our criteria of acting, a force that drives our commitment to construct a more human society, a hope that animates our whole daily living.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
