Our Divine Longing for Dignity

December 19, 2023


Hi! How is each and every one? Wow!  We are already on the third day of Simbang Gabi, our Filipino custom and traditional way of celebrating the nine days before the birth of the child, Jesus.  We are hoping and wishing for a happy, peaceful, blessed birthday of Jesus, the only Begotten Son of God, our Savior and Redeemer.

What are you and I going to gift Jesus? We want to love Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our will, all our body and all our affectivity and to love our neighbor as our self.  Yes!  That is what you and I want to tell the Baby Jesus and what you and I truly want Him to help us in our life on earth.

Following is the continuation of the previous post (From Broken Gods, Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart, Gregory K. Popcak, Ph. D. Ch 2).

Envy, the second of the capital sins

Opus Dei

Envy is a distortion of the divine longing for dignity, the desire to have our worth as persons acknowledged and celebrated.  We all want to know that we are worth something, that we are valuable and that we have innate dignity. In fact, as our examination of our call to divinization shows, God longs to bestow upon us a dignity beyond anything we could imagine!  In this life, the divine longing for dignity helps us realize that we are truly God’s gift to the world (in the healthiest sense of that phrase)!  Further, it facilitates our divinization by challenging us to become more effective instruments of God’s love and care.

But how do you and I become more effective instruments of God’s love and care? 

Simply put by doing God’s will at all times.  Knowledge of God’s will comes about through prayer and loving conversation with God in our hearts and with His mother Mary, also our mother.  We ask for a listening heart that is always willing to listen to others and for a pair of helping hands ready to serve them.

Envy distorts our longing for dignity by telling us that we have no worth or value unless we have everything that everyone else around us has, and that we can accomplish everything that everyone else can achieve.  When we give in to envy, we see every relationship as a competition in which either we come out on top or we are the loser.

To go against envying others you and I must first recognize and accept what you and I are, our talents and blessings; our defects and weaknesses.  Then compete with ourself by going against our love for comfort, laziness, feelings, against wanting what the others have, against comparing ourself with the others, etc.  Rather let us look at how we could grow with the others and enjoy ourselves together.

Opus Dei:  Authority is a service; listening to others is a sign of kindness

The divine longing for dignity can be truly satisfied only if we practice the heavenly virtue of kindness.  When we practice grace-inspired kindness with others, we encourage them to bloom in our presence.  Kindness enables us to discover our dignity by enabling us to become the means through which others encounter theirs.

Like Mary may you and I can learn how to share and celebrate the blessings of the others.  Our Lady was three months conceiving Jesus when the angel Gabriel announced to her that she is the chosen mother of the son of God and that her cousin, Elizabeth in her old age is on her sixth month of pregnancy. What did Mary do?  She went in haste to the hill country to be at the service of her cousin, Elizabeth and together they shared their blessings and proclaimed the goodness and greatness of our Lord.

May you and I learn to be souls of prayer and take care of good manners in our life of piety, in our relationship with Jesus, Mary and Joseph; with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky

 

  

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