Unusual Channel
'How to serve and give'
I yield my space today to an article written by a friend, a native of Sta. Barbara, who now resides in New York, USA. Though he lives miles away from our country he is well aware of the goings on here through the world wide web. He knows what is happening here in Iloilo through the on-line edition of The News Today. I wanted to acknowledge him by mentioning his name but he did not want. So I would just like to thank him. Read on...
How to serve and give
It is with charity as with happiness and Holiness. What you call experience of happiness is not happiness at all but thrill of excitement delivered by people, things or events. True happiness is felt for no reason at all. It is not in the realm of consciousness.
In the same token is Holiness. The moment you became aware of your holiness it becomes more of self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good unless the one who delivered the kindness is not even aware of his act. This goodness translates into a virtue. It is spontaneous and you are not forced to do so. It is something you feel doing without limit or condition. Real virtue are your passions, it is something cultivated on yourself in doing without consequential expectations. Therefore, the first quality of Holiness is being unconscious.
The second quality is Effortless. Effort can change behavior but not a person. Effort can feed the food in your mouth but it can’t create appetite. It can put you to bed but can’t force you to sleep; it can produce intimacy but never attain trust; it can force you to pay compliment but not genuine admiration. Effort forces us to render different services but it’s powerless to harvest love and Holiness. All you can achieve with effort is repression, never a genuine change and growth.
In our society today a lot of distinguished people force themselves to do a certain act for different reasons. Some try to serve and give for name recognition. While others pretend to do benevolent action and services to score political points for self-promotion. Still others love to feed their ego with the kind of pretentious acts all documented by cameras, media and colorful extravaganza. When there’s a hidden agenda in our action what we all deliver are fake impressions. We can’t glorify ourselves in doing these instead we build hypocrisy. There must be sincerity on all our noble actions to feel that happiness in our notions.
The third quality of Holiness is that it should not be desired. If you desire happiness you will be anxious lest not to attain it. You will always be in a state of dissatisfaction and anxiety which kills the very happiness you set to gain. When we desire Holiness for ourselves, we feed the very greed and ambitions that will make us selfish, vain and unholy. You cannot force yourself to be a person that you are not. We sometimes try to force the issue on things we covet in life, things we wanted to attain and achieved, yet it doesn’t come naturally.
Our ego then becomes a great technician to achieve what we desire. To attain popularity we buy our own crowd. Friendship and love are earned and is not sold in the public auction. Admiration comes out of your own creation. It is a consequence of your passion, your love your sincerity and goodness. We can’t be sanctified if we are rigid, mechanical, lifeless, intolerant and unjust to glorify ourselves. It becomes self-promotion. As wily technicians, we became manipulators and spin masters to alter results to feed our selfish ambitions. In doing this it defeats the purpose of giving, sharing and serving. We don’t serve the poor, the needy or the under-privileged but rather our false attachment in life.
Holiness is brought about by awareness and understanding. Understand your unhappiness and it will disappear. In natural way it brings you joy. Understand your pride and it will drop. What comes out of it is humility. Understand your fears and it will melt. Then it brings you love. Understand your attachment and it will vanish. Now you will feel freedom. Love, freedom and happiness are not something we can produce or cultivate. These things take its own course in natural fashion.
As we celebrate the final week of Lent, this is something you must understand; there are two sources of changes within us. One is the cunningness of our self-image to paint ourselves of someone we are not meant to be to give us a self-boost or popularity. The other is wisdom of nature. Thanks to the wisdom, we learn to understand, to be compassionate, and to self indulge in something that we believe, to love, to share and to serve.
Only when people see on us the freedom, the love and the passion of what we do, that the Holiness sprung within us. As we feel this freedom and Joy in our hearts then we must be Truly Blessed.
“When you give alms, don’t let your right hand know what the left hand is doing “
(For your comments please email me at rbuy1028@gmail.com)