Recollected amid the hustle and bustle

We have to learn this skill. It's actually a fundamental and indispensable skill. Without it, there's no other way but for us to get confused and lost in our worldly and temporal affairs. And instead of reaching our final and proper destination, we end up somewhere else.

We have to learn to gather all our powers and faculties together so they can be engaged with their proper and ultimate objects which, ultimately, are God and others. We have to see to it that everything we do and get involved in, somehow get into the lifelong dynamic of loving God and others.

What we have to avoid is to have our powers and faculties scattered and often in conflict with one another, entangled with objects that, though having some validity, are not the proper and ultimate objects we should try to pursue.

This need for recollection simply indicates that our life consists of different aspects and levels that we have to orchestrate to be able to reach our final end. We just cannot go about reacting spontaneously to things, depending solely on instincts and feelings. We are meant for something much, much more than these.

Our tendency, given our fallen nature and the effects of our personal sins, is to get dispersed in our attention and to plunge into activism. In the process, we lose our interior serenity and eventually our true way.

The loss of serenity can lead us to bad consequences-loss of self-control and dominion over things, proneness to temptations, vices and sins, disorder in our sense of priority, etc.

For Christian believers, the source and end of their consciousness should be God. This is simply because the Christian faith teaches that God is the creator of the whole universe, including us, and continues to govern us intimately in our hearts. There should therefore be a living relationship between God and the believer.

We need to be focused always on him. Straying from him would be to stray from reality. It would lead us to make our own reality and our own world, with consequences that sooner or later will always be bad for us.

For Christian believers, reality is not simply the items that we see or hear or even feel. Reality is a given, not made by us. It has to be discovered, not invented by us. But it has to enter deep into our being, since we have a subjective mode of existence.

And ultimately the one who gives the reality to us is God, since things just don't break into existence on their own. There is an ultimate cause -God. God is the foundation of everything.

This human need for recollection will always bring us to the realization of the existence of God, with the corresponding rights and duties towards him. We should therefore see that everything in our life has God in it, or at least traces of God in it. We just have to learn how to discover God in these things.

If we have the proper spirit of recollection, everything in our life, whether good or bad, big or small, can be an occasion to know, love and serve God and others.

We have to work this skill out, helping one another, being patient and understanding with one another, since the road to it, aside from being narrow, is strewn with difficulties, traps, and snares.

‘We need to be focused always on him. Straying from him would be to stray from reality. It would lead us to make our own reality

and our own world’