Taken For Granted
I fell in love.
Yes I did, with my current treatise in Philosophy, Metaphysics. It spoke for me of the wonder of being. This morning, the discussion, and I would spare you the philosophical definitions, fell on the nature and characteristics of being. One line struck me most and this I would share with you:
“The best way of hiding anything is to make it common, to place it among the most ordinary objects.”
Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics (1962)
Our great professor, Fr. Michael La Guardia, SDB, decried the fact that we have lost the wonder of being. He was near teary eyed when he recalled how as children we used to have fun in the rain and do all those stupid stuff kids do. He concluded it in a statement, we have outgrown them. And yes, I remember writing about this losing the sense of wonder, but more than that, we have lost the wonder of being.
We easily take for granted the many things around us because they are so common, and we think that they would always be there. As J. Maritain put it, we lost the wonder of things in the daily drag of life. Not just things, but also persons. We have lost the connection to the people we love simply because we lull ourselves to believe that everything will be the same, forever and ever, amen.
But no, not everything will be the same. People will come and go. How many of us has been slapped in the face whenever a loved one passes away? How many of us punish ourselves with regret over so many missed opportunities and times and moments we let go because it is so common, so ‘not me anymore’?
Everyone has experienced the sting of being taken for granted, of being put aside, of being denied the acknowledgment of existence but everyone is doing it to everyone else. Maybe it is helpful to count our blessings every morning, especially with gift of persons around us, and appreciate them for who they are and for what they mean to us, then we will truly be able to wonder at the incalculable and innumerable grace and wonder that God has given us.
Then, there is God, who is in everything and in everywhere. He who is so near and so accessible has become so far, distant, and vague to us. We also have lost the wonder of God because we also take Him for granted. He is lost in the ordinariness of our daily lives, lost in the sea and tides of noise and humdrums of modernity, lost and placed at the most recess part of our priorities. The source of everything has been placed in the background.
Now it makes sense why God bewails the human memory! It is so easy for us to forget. And that path will lead to regret. But we can be assured that God will never forget, and he will never take for granted all those that he has placed in the palm of his hands. Amen.
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