It is easy to come across people who declare themselves to be religious and who, regardless of what that means for them, display extraordinary ethical standards in their behaviour. They become true models and examples for those of us who feel we are believers. They resolve in an existential way what Albert Camus posed as an unanswerable question: “How to be saints without God? This is the greatest problem of life”.
We should all not only offer the homage of our greatest respect to such people, but also make our admiration for them positively explicit. Most of us encounter other difficulties that impede, or perhaps slow down, the path of our human and spiritual growth. One of them is the lack of attention especially to the little things of everyday life. We live distracted and scattered
From the moment we fail to notice the small steps we take “downwards” … we plunge into a slump. This is indeed the drama of the spiritual life in these times when we have a myriad of artefacts that capture our attention and determine our interests, schedules and lifestyles.
For we are not usually sidetracked by a gesture of extreme violence, or a serious crime or a superlative misstep. They are not frequent. Not at all. Something flatter and more pedestrian happens to us. It is that imperceptible inadvertence of the drop by drop. A repetition of actions with which apparently nothing happens and which are easily excusable: a small lie told out of fear, a small theft caused by a real or imagined need, an obscene and secret curiosity, a lack of loyalty to a given word, the neglect of a minor but binding commitment… By excusing this type of behaviour with automatic ease because of its low moral character, the neglect weakens our moral conscience to progressively divert us from the truth and from the good. Sometimes, alas, irreversibly.
A person does not become immoral consciously and voluntarily. One does not break an ethical construct with a slam of the door. Deviations occur more subtly and silently, in the form of drowsiness, trivialisation, insensitivity to the real good. In this way the voice of conscience becomes soundless and nebulous.
Juan Carlos Martos cmf
(PHOTO: Bud Helisson)
