By Fr. Roy Cimagala

That is the message of the gospel reading for Ash Wednesday. (cfr. Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18) “Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them,” Christ said, “Otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.” Then he continued by describing how we should give alms and how we should pray.

This total self-giving without being showy is achieved when we manage to glorify God always in our thoughts, our words and deeds. And that would even give us the best time here on earth, the highest “high” we can ever attain in this life. That’s simply because glorifying God constitutes the best act of love we can give God, who is our Creator and Father.

Glorifying God can only signify that we are giving everything to him, everything in our life that includes not only the good things but also the repented bad and negative things all the way to our death.

It is an act of total self-giving and submission to him who is everything to us. Through it, we empty ourselves completely to fill ourselves only with God. It is where we unite ourselves to him completely and share in his own glory.

This act of glorifying God presumes that we do it out of love, out of freedom, and of total gratuitousness that corresponds to God’s total and gratuitous love for us.

Let’s remember that God himself, through Christ, had to empty himself by becoming man, out of sheer love for us. This is the language of love. One empties himself to fill himself with his beloved. We achieve this self-emptying and God-filling when we manage to glorify God.

We should see to it that whatever we do, we should try our best that we manage to glorify God. St. Paul precisely said as much: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

We may have to make a very deliberate effort to do this, especially in the beginning. Hopefully, time will come that after doing this many times, it will become a habit for us, something that we do automatically.

But we need to realize that we have to take the utmost care of our intention, making it as explicit as possible, and honing it to get engaged with its proper and ultimate object, who is God.

We should try our best to shun being simply casual or cavalier about this responsibility. We can easily play around with it, since intentions are almost invariably hidden from public knowledge. We are urged to be most sincere in directing our intentions properly.

We can easily fall into hypocrisy and deception, doing what can appear good externally but is not internally, since we could refuse to give glory to God, which is the proper intention to have, and instead feed and stir our own vanity, pride, greed, lust, etc.

Thus, we need to actively purify our intentions, since we have to contend with many spoilers in this regard these days. In fact, we just have to look around and see how openly opposed many people are to directing their intentions to God.

We cannot overemphasize the importance of this concern. We have to do our best to see to it that we always have purity of intention in everything that we do, so that we only love and serve God, and because of that, we can properly love and serve everybody else./WDJ