Fluctuating Between Poles, Getting Distracted

I have recently been reading this book "Reaching Out", which unlike what the title implies is actually about reaching inwards to oneself. And one of the recent read - "Our world, however, is not divided between lonely people and solitaries. We constantly fluctuate between these poles and differ from hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week and year-to-year".

I find this insight especially striking, although it's extremely obvious. In our struggle of sinfulness and holiness, sorrow and joy, we're constantly in a flux in our lives. But yet, the power of the insight lies with whether we are "aware" that we're in flux. It is the distraction of the world today and the distraction of ourselves that blind us from this simple, yet ever standing truth. We cannot run away from this flux, but it doesn't matter that we're not in control. For no human can ever be in full control.

This tie in with the beautiful homily delivered at St Mary of the Angels today. The topic is on "Temptations", but what the priest spoke on was not on the typical perspective of how to overcome them. He spoke about the purpose of temptations in our lives, about how without temptations we cannot situate our spiritual well-being - just as how without pain, we cannot situate our physical world and hence expose ourselves to further danger. It is because of pain that we realize we exist and that we know when we draw back from danger.

In the same light, temptations can never be fully rid from our lives, and rightly so it should never be. We need temptations in our lives. Temptations are not sins, and should not be correlated with sins. It is because we're so distracted from our very self that we've allowed ourselves to be desensitized ourselves to temptations. We allows temptations to equate with sins, because we've lost the ability to choose and act. We let temptations take over our soul and blame it on the devil for our sins. The distractions from this world are so powerful that they've caused us to believe that we're powerless in the face of temptations. Indeed, it is timely during lent to hear such beautiful message at mass - do not be distracted from our cause in this life, but learn to embrace the temptations in our lives because they remind us that we're still living, that we're still human.

To end off, I love this sentence that Fr William Goh made in a Straits Times article (More Catholics in the fold, but fewer shepherds) which I read this morning - 'It is God who calls people to the vocation. The problem is, many people are distracted and cannot hear the call.'