Life, its crises and self-realization

Life, its crises and self-realization

By Tomás Núñez, ThD

 

We almost always talk about crises and crises of crises, the crisis of the Earth and the crisis of life, threatened with disappearing as Pope Francis pointed out in his encyclical on “the care of our Common Home.” But everything we live is marked by crises: crises of birth, of youth, of choosing a life partner, crises of choosing a profession, crises of the “midday demon” as Freud called it, which is the crisis of forty years when we realize that we are already reaching the top of the mountain and the descent begins. And finally, the great crisis of death, when we pass from time to eternity.

 

The challenge posed to each one is not how to avoid crises. They are inherent to our human condition. The question is how we face them: what lessons we draw from them and how we can grow with them. This is the path to our self-realization and our maturation as human beings.

 

Every situation is good, every place is excellent for measuring ourselves against ourselves and diving into our deep dimension and letting the basic archetype that we carry within emerge (the underlying tendency that always hammers us) and that through us wants to show itself and make its history, which is also our true history.

 

Here no one can replace the other. Each one is alone. It is the fundamental task of existence. But if one is faithful in this journey, the person is never alone. He has built a personal Center from which he can meet all the other walkers. From being solitary, he becomes solidary.

 

The geography of the spiritual world is different from that of the physical world. In this one, countries touch each other by the limits. In the other, by the Center. Indifference, mediocrity, the absence of passion in the search for our deep Self is what distances us from our Center and from others, and thus we lose affinities, even if we are next to them, in their midst, and we pretend to be at their service.

 

What is the best service I can provide to people? Being myself as a relational being and therefore always linked to others, a being who chooses the good for oneself and for others, who is guided by truth, loves and has compassion and mercy.

 

Personal fulfillment does not consist in the quantity of personal capacities that we can realize, but in the quality, in the way we do well what situated life demands of us. Quantification, the search for titles, endless courses, can mean for many people the escape from the encounter with the task of their life: measuring themselves against themselves, their desires, their limitations, their problems, their positives and negatives and integrating them creatively. Fleeing from the accumulation of innocuous knowledge, which makes us arrogant and distances us from others, is what matures us to be able to better understand ourselves and the world.

 

Language betrays these people who say: I am the one who knows, I am the one who does, I am the one who decides. It is always the self and never the we or the cause, which is also shared by others. Personal fulfillment is not so much the work of reason, which is above all, but of the spirit, which is our ability to create overall visions and to order things in their right place and value. Spirit is discovering the meaning of each situation. That is why the wisdom of life, the experience of the mystery of God, deciphered at every moment, is proper to the spirit. It is the ability to be everything in everything that is done. Spirituality is not a science or a technique, but a way of being whole in each situation.

 

The first task of personal fulfillment is to accept our situation with its limits and possibilities. In each situation there is everything, not quantitatively distended, but qualitatively collected as in a Center. To enter that Center of ourselves is to find others, all things and God. That is why the old wisdom of India said: “If someone thinks correctly, collected in his room, his thought is heard thousands of kilometers away.” If you want to change others, start by changing yourself.

 

Another essential task for personal fulfillment is to know how to live with the ultimate limit, which is death. Whoever gives meaning to death, also gives meaning to life. Whoever does not see meaning in death, also finds no meaning in life. Death, however, is more than the last moment or the end of life. Life itself is mortal. In other words, we die slowly, in benefits, because as soon as we are born, we begin to die, to wear ourselves out and to say goodbye to life. First, we say goodbye to the mother’s womb and die for it. Then we say goodbye to infancy, childhood, youth, school, the parental home, adulthood, some of our tasks, each passing moment and finally we say goodbye to life itself.

 

This farewell is leaving behind not only things and situations, but always a little of ourselves. We have to detach ourselves, impoverish ourselves and empty ourselves. What is the meaning of all this? Pure, irreformable fate? Or does it not have a secret meaning? We strip ourselves of everything, even of ourselves at the last moment of life (death), because we were not made for this world or for ourselves, but for the Great Other who must fill our life: God. God goes through life taking everything from us to reserve us ever more intensely for himself; he can even take away from us the certainty of whether it was all worth it. Even so, we persist, believing in the sacred words: “If your heart accuses you, know that God is greater than your heart” (cf. 1 Jn 3:20). Whoever succeeds in integrating negativities, even unjust ones, into his own Center, will have reached the highest degree of humanization and inner freedom.

 

The negativities and crises we go through teach us this lesson: to strip ourselves and prepare ourselves for total plenitude in God. Then, as the mystic Saint John of the Cross says: we will be God, by participation.