Reflections and Ruminations

My first protest march

2012-01-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

Last Monday, I did something thatI would never have had the opportunity to do back home in Singapore. I joined over 200,000 people indowntown Washington DC to march in protest against legalized abortion. This huge and very organized eventtakes place every year in January in the nation’s capital on the anniversary ofthe Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made it legal to procure abortionssince 1973. Apparently, it is oneof the largest protests in this place where protests are commonplaceactivities. Prior to the protestmarch per se, there was a Mass that was celebrated in the enormous Verizoncentre in downtown Chinatown, and on the night before, in the Basilica rightacross the street from my residence, a pre-protest day Mass was also celebratedwith thousands in attendance. Ionly managed to march for a small part of the route, and apparently, it was sohuge a turnout, despite the freezing and wet weather, it took almost two hoursfor the crowd to finish walking by any one spot of Constitution Avenue to endup at the Capitol Hill.

The official March for Life banner stretching across the entire width of Constitution Avenue

What draws so many people,largely Catholics (with pockets of protesters from other denomination, to besure) to this annual event, many coming by overnight buses and trains fromstates that are as far away from DC as Singapore is from Thailand and Vietnam? Mostly, it is our concerted belief thatlife is sacred, and that abortion is a heinous and murderous act, which mustnot be legalized. Did my stand onthis issue only appear on my moral compass only because I am currently living inthe country where since 1973, an approximate 54.5 million lives (try wrappingyour head around that number) had been denied life legally? No. I have always held that life is sacred, and that abortion isevil in every way. It’s just thatthere has been no opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellowpro-life brothers and sisters (at Hong Lim Green back home in Singapore?) toshow how strongly we think about this. Yes, I have preached about this from the Ambo before, but I also do knowthat it can become very emotional for someone listening in the pew, especiallyif that person had undergone an abortion before. Besides, it is because this evil is so rampant and so easilyprocured that the moral issue is hardly given serious thought about by thepeople who seek this easy exit from a ‘problem pregnancy’. Yet, this must not silence us frompreaching against this egregious act that it is. We need to name it for what it is, and murder is its name. Funding for healthcare that ischanneled to abortions in this country is another crazy matter. How in the world does ‘murder’ comeunder ‘healthcare’?

The issue that is before us ismuch larger than we think. It hasa lot to do with how people (young AND old) approach sex and how sacred a giftit is. Many, unfortunately, do notsee it as a gift from God. Infact, it is one of the most precious gifts that God ever gave us because ingiving it to us, he invited us to be part of the process of creation itself,something that only God has the right to do, and the ability to do aswell. He wants to share life and toshare the act of life with us. That is a privilege that we don’t even think much about. It was with deep insight that aspiritual writer once remarked that pornography is wrong simply because it putson public display something that is Godly. What is happening at every sacred conjugal act is a coupleis cooperating with God at the level of creation. God is displaying himself, and no one (biblically speaking)can see God and live. RememberMoses, and how his face was brilliantly white and dazzling after he metGod? It was a figurative way ofconveying that in such intimate moments of divine encounter, there is somethingthat just needs to be wrapped in mystery and is not meant for public display,and certainly not for entertainment or worse, recreation. It is certainly not a right, but agift. The marital bed is really analtar of sacrifice, where God is present because there is a total giving and atotal receiving – of lives to one another, and to God as well. Imagine Simmons, Serta, or Omazz advertisingfor their mattresses this way – what prophetic teaching!

When we put aside these thoughts,and think that sex is a rite of passage to adulthood, we distort somethingbeautiful. When we think that sexis recreation, we adulterate something sacred. And when we teach our children to be ‘protected’ or teachthem ‘protected sex’, we are telling them that sex is dangerous, when in fact,it was (and still is) one of God’s most beautiful gifts that he bestows onhumankind because it shares in his divine act of creation. God doesn’t give us dangerousthings. We have made it dangerous,and have distorted it and disfigured it. The words “safe” and “sex” put together certainly connotes that it isnot a gift, and certainly not something precious to be handled with care andrespect. We have gone so far wrongin this that it seems a herculean task to undo it.

Yet, we still can rely on thegrace of God that we have the hope of good parenting, which dares to beprophetic. I agree that it seemsan uphill task for parents (especially Catholic ones) to speak a differentlanguage than what schools and educators tell our children about sexeducation. I will continue to prayfor courage for both parents and children to not only speak the right thing,but to also dare to do the right thing, and yes, to also march to a different drumbeatof life, for life.

When going back is the most important thing

2012-01-22T17:00:00.000-05:00

Let's be clear about one thing first. I am not homesick (at leastnot terribly). Nor am I pining to celebrate the Lunar New Year with my fellowSingaporeans and family, though it would be a nice thing to do. I am writing on this theme of ‘goingback’ because of something that I came across in one of my required readings.

It is a quote from the great T.S.Eliot, from his poem entitled ‘Little Gidding’, from the fourth and final of his“Four Quartets” series. It reads:

With the drawing of this Love,and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease fromexploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where westarted

And know the place for the firsttime.

A great deal of our human questsand aspirations, though at first appearing to lead us away from our simplebeginnings, are in fact huge detours, excursions and side trips that bringdelights galore. But when we are satisfiedand fully sated with exhilaration, we often realize that what we long for is areturn to where we began, or as T.S. Eliot says, to ‘arrive where we started,and know the place for the first time’.

In my study of theology andseemingly esoteric academic pursuits which pose such a challenge for thisno-longer nimble mind of mine, so many of my readings have this undergirdingdiscovery that it is often not a newness that academics and teachers are reallytrying to impart, but a recovery, and a deeper appreciation and a harking backto what the Church has always taught. Yes, there have been new developments of theological and spiritualthought through the ages, but the undergirding truth is that the reality thatgrounds it all has never and will never change – simply because it is truth andlove itself – God.

At the same time, our humannature loves to explore new things and experience delight in them. Traveling to new lands thrills andexcites many, and being introduced to things unseen and un-tasted beforesomehow jolts one into the realization that we are more alive than everbefore. But after one has tastedand drunk so much, read so much and experienced thrills ad nauseam, newness canreach a saturation point and ennui creeps up upon us, often unannounced.

It is at this point that thehuman person becomes most attentive, most willing and even pliable to cooperatewith the grace of God that constantly beckons one to return to one’s originsand ‘home-base’ in Him.

That’s the amazing and trulysubtle nature of how the grace of God works. The grace of God is one of the most important things that wehumans can ever have in our lives, and at the same time, it is also one of themost misunderstood and underappreciated gifts that we can ever have. Up and down the centuries, there havebeen people who have been determined to believe (and even heretically teach)that grace can be earned and merited. Though the father of this heresy is generally known to be Pelagius, wholived in the early part of the fifth century, his way of thinking about gracehas somehow persisted in various forms right up till now in the ways that manyCatholics erroneously think that they can earn the goodness or the blessings ofGod, simply by being good. I haveheard these people being called semi-Pelagians, but that’s just a name orcategory until we can readily identify which part of their theology has shadesof Pelagianism.

But this much is certain. Once a person has been touched by theunmistakable grace of God, once that hard heart is softened, readied and prepared, he orshe is then ready to return to that place of settlement and solace. St Augustine’s famous line from hisConfessions echoes something of a familiar strain that almost parallels T.S.Eliot’s in the first part of this reflection. “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in you”.

Indeed then, 'going back' will bethe most important journey that we make in life. Most of us will struggle against it at first. We may protest and fuss. It may be a very long journey and it could be avery hard task, but it undoubtedly, it will also be the most important things we do in life, because we will be doing it for life.

Kindness and the Christian life

2012-01-15T17:00:00.001-05:00

Is un-kindness a trait that is sototally foreign, alien and incompatible with Christianity? Many think that it is. After all, Jesus himself has never beenunkind and he is the prototype for all of humanity. And there are a huge number of people who are loath to seeany traits of unkindness in people who are supposed to be leaders, especiallythose in ecclesial leadership, and are ever-so-quick to point out thatsuch-and-such acts and words are unkind, and ought not to be practiced if onewere purported to be a disciple of Christ.

But herein lies the problem ofour individual humanity being such an admixture of human and spirit. As St Paul is so humble to point outand admit, so many of us do what we should not do, and are not doing what weshould. It comes from Rom7:5. Paul saw in himself thatsimilar trait and so do we.

I have found myself facing thisconundrum ever-so-often, and I realize that the more I am regular in my prayerand meditation, the more I see it clearly when the situation manifestsitself. It is as if prayer and ourconcerted effort in cooperating with God’s grace in life develops another beingof ourselves that sees our works and actions from a third-party distance, andwe get insights into our lives from a vantage point that would not have beendeveloped had we just lived life in a carefree attitude. Prayer helps us do this – it developsour third person vista which some prefer to call a hightened conscience orstate of awareness.

There are always ways in which wecould have done things better. Most of the time, we don’t have the luxury of a time so that we cananalyse which approach is most kind, and most effective, and most Christlikebefore the act. We act oninstinct. And that, unfortunately,is the crux of the problem. Mostof our instincts are animalistic, not those of rational animals, as Aristotledefines our shared genus.

When I have followed thatinstinct, I know that it had led me to skip the pleasantries, to discount theother’s needs and weaknesses, to think more of myself and what I want toachieve, and to get things done in only one way – mine. And there are times when it shows howslow I am to suffer fools.

I am sure that some toes wouldhave been stepped upon and even crushed in so doing. I was reminded of this in an anonymous comment that came inmy blog two days ago. Someone backin Singapore must have been reminded of a time when unkindness and impatiencewas shown to him or her by me, most probably in the course of my ministry. I would have loved to engage the personin conversation and find out how this could be rectified, but alas, at mosttimes, anonymity neither allows this, nor does it show that the person is at allinterested in any amicable restoration.

It behooves me then to offer anolive branch of an apology to this person. Thank you for having pointed out that you are a hurt person,but it would have helped much more if the specific incident were referred to,to make this apology more specific and a healing experience.

In closing, I guess I will referto my opening statement. Unkindness is unreservedly incompatible with Christianity.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximaculpa.

The Magi(c) of a real God experience

2012-01-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

There always seems to be something apparently ethereal about the feast of the Epiphany that the church celebrated yesterday. Here, we read of an insecure and scheming despot, men of mysterious origins looking at the heavens for signs and directions, receiving communications via dreams to go to somewhere there is something to discover, and our minds are filled with images that are unearthly and unnerving; and something perhaps subtle and sublime. The creative minds of artists have been moved to conjure up graphic images that evoke the sense that there is something more than meets the eye.

While the scriptures say nothing of three men, but only of three gifts that were presented, tradition seems to favour the idea that three different men carried the three symbolic gifts. But we lose the significance of the event of this meeting if we focus on the little periphery details, which is often the case. What is THE significance then? It is this - The Epiphany, which literally means the “manifestation”. What was being manifested, which was hitherto hidden and kept rather silent, was the wonder of the incarnation when God and man met in Jesus’ birth. That God deemed humankind the necessary conduit and recipient of salvation was now something that needed to be proclaimed to all and sundry, no longer something that was reserved for an elite few. That, is the “matter” of the Epiphany.

The command and invitation given to all at the end of every Mass is precisely this – to dare to imitate the courageous and prophetic Magi to first of all encounter the holy, and then from here, to bring the wonder of salvation to every heart and soul that has yet to encounter the salvation which we have just received unworthily at the Holy Communion given to us. In this sense, the Epiphany is not just a feast that we observe and celebrate one day a year, but at every moment that we are aware that we bring with us from the Altar of Sacrifice something much more precious than Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. We bring with us the one who was the recipient of these gifts of deep significance himself. We bring the Christ.

It is far easier to want to stay at the warm and safe place where the infant king is found and not depart from the presence of the Lord. After all, the outside world poses threats aplenty and few appreciate the ways that the Lord displaces their self-centered universes. Later in his adult years, the grown infant would remind his disciples that no prophet is accepted in his own country. And if we really have been prophetic in our actions, we would have experienced just how painfully true this is.

What makes one ready to be like the Magi after every Eucharist? Perhaps we have overlooked one thing about the Magi and their actions when they came before the infant King. We are told that they opened their treasures. They didn’t give just a little of what they brought. They emptied the entire contents of what they had been carrying with them for the journey thus far. What they had with them, they gave of the fullest. How much we need to learn from this kenotic act.

Much of our hearts, yours and mine, are often filled with so many preoccupations and thoughts of the self and needless worries when we come to celebrate the Eucharist. Surely, we could learn a thing or two from the Magi about how to open these bags and satchels and duffel bags of our worldly preoccupations so that they can be filled with the grace that a true encounter with the Lord can provide.

I believe that if we have truly encountered the Lord, be it at Mass or in some other way, we will naturally want to share this wonderful experience with another so that the joy can be expanded, so that there is a larger experience of the reality of salvation. This the Magi did in an extraordinary way. They “epiphanized”.

And this is what we too need to do. Now, like the Magi, we need to go back to our lives in ways that are new and with eyes that see the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Who knows - we will probably see paths that we never saw before and see beauty and life and love anew.

Approaching newness with an old caution

2012-01-01T17:00:00.001-05:00

The feelings that the dawn of a new year brings are varied, to be sure. It will be different for a married person with a family just as it will be different for a single person who is newly employed. It will be challenging for those embarking on a new adventure or enterprise, and it will also be akin to walking on eggshells for those who have come from a former year that had been fraught with pains, disappointments and perhaps failure. As I write this first blog entry of 2012, I realize that there are some strange feelings within me, putting my thoughts in words for a readership that is largely 9000 km away from me, alone in the winter night of Washington DC. What are these feelings? It’s a strange hamper – of wistful longing, of hope, of deep appreciation and perhaps not too surprisingly, of melancholy.

I am sure that I am not alone in recognizing this gamut of emotions as the earth that we are on slowly turns to face the sun for the final time of 2011. What cannot be changed is the fact that a new year will be dawning (or, depending on when you get to read this entry – has dawned) upon us. But what can be affected, governed and influenced will be how we do what we do in the coming year. Many no doubt, will wish one another a Happy New Year. But it is also very true that happiness is an inside job. If our happiness depends on external factors alone, then our familiar greeting of “Happy New Year” is akin to being fatalists, or believing in pre-destination, that each of our lives is set on a pre-determined course. But we Catholics are not fatalists, nor have we ever believed that our lives are moving on a pre-set course that we can do nothing about.

Rom 14:7 is a familiar text to many who have participated attentively at funeral liturgies. It reads “The life and death of each of us has its influence on others”. That we influence one another in an organically connected way within the Body of Christ has to bear great weight on how we live our lives, especially on the cusp of a new year.

I watched a rather interesting documentary on the life of Harper Lee, the renowned literary award-winning author of the classic “To Kill A Mockingbird”, a book very dear to me, and came away with the idea of this blog’s reflection. I was surprised to learn that when Ms Lee wrote that book, when she met her publishers for the first time in their office in New York City back in 1957, she didn’t think very much of her work. In fact, she was hoping for a ‘quick and merciful death’ at the hands of the reviewers. But many authors have since named her classic as the one work that had influenced their vision and made them the authors that they are now.

Isn’t that what each of us secretly harbours in our heart of hearts? That our lives, our direction in life, our hopes and dreams actually bear a positive and generative influence for others who are members of the Body of Christ? Which parent doesn’t want her child to see her actions as examples of shining lights in a world darkened by selfishness and sin? Which teacher doesn’t want his charges to absorb the best that he can share through the dissemination of knowledge and experience? Which leader doesn’t want those under her leadership to become just as if not even greater leaders with vision and foresight? And, I suppose, on a more personal note, which priest doesn’t pray that his flock and those he is entrusted with become saints through his direction and care?

Is the ego on grand display here? It will certainly be an element in the whole works, but what we need to realize is that when it becomes the overriding impetus for our why we are doing what we are doing, that is when we need to take a step back and calm the torrential waters of the false self that can cause a myriad of problems of our lives.

This is also the best time to go back to Rom 14:7, and continue to read the remaining parts of that verse, which tell us just how we should be influencing others. It goes thus - “if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord, so that alive or dead, we belong to the Lord.” The fact remains for us Christians, that as long as we are Christ-centered in our lives, the weight and extent of our influence should not have much negative impact on others, but lead them to greater heights of wholeness and holiness.

Yes, we do like new things don’t we? We look forward to new experiences, new relationships, new business ventures, new opportunities and new hopes in the coming year. When I am given these, I need to be mindful that I should be handling them with an old caution, not to make the same stupid mistakes that I did in the past. And if I were truly honest with myself, I’d have to admit that Christ was hardly at my centre when those adventures became misadventures.

Do I wish every one of my readers a Happy New Year? Without a doubt. But it comes with a qualification – that in 2012, the paths that each of us takes towards happiness is greatly formed and influenced first by having the Lord in the centre of our lives.

The Soul's worth shown by the Word made Flesh

2011-12-25T16:01:00.001-05:00

As members of the human race, we share a lot of common experiences and emotions. We have our moments of joys and triumphs, our moments of happiness and elation. On the flip side, we also do know that we have encountered sadness and sorrow as well. One of the most damaging things that a human person can go through in life in terms of feelings is to feel worthless and without value. This is when a person’s dignity is stripped away and left with little or nothing to cherish or love.

I hope that it has never happened to you, but maybe there have been times when you were told by either your parents or your teachers, in their moments of anger and fury, that you are useless or hopeless as a person. Hearing these things does nothing to see ourselves as persons of value and worth. But the truth is that each one of us is of great value and has an immense worth – not for the things that we can do, but for the persons that you and I are.

What we are celebrating today – the incarnation of God, where God became one of us, is precisely this. God is not telling us that we have worth. God is showing us this in concrete, physical, tangible form. My Christmas reflection has been partly inspired by something I came across when I read something from a spiritual great, Fr Richard Rohr.

It was back in 1847 in France, that a parish priest asked a wine merchant and poet by the name of Placede Cappeau to write a poem for Christmas. He came up with a poem entitled “Midnight, Christians”, and it was later that these words were put to music by Adolphe Charles Adam, another Frenchman, to become immortalized as the Christmas Carol “O Holy Night”. One of the most theologically and spiritually sound lines in the hymn tells us what happened when the incarnation took place – Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth. Some translations have it as the “spirit” felt its worth. They essentially mean the same thing.

You see, none of us is worthless and without value. Cappeau must have had a deep sense of this. No matter what we may have been told by angry parents or disenchanted employers and no matter what we may have done in our stupidest of times. And all of us have met them in our lives.

A lot of us have been told by stores, advertising agencies and misguided friends and relations about what they think Christmas is about. Some songs have even done that rather successfully. It’s not about giving or receiving gifts, it’s not about reindeer, or snow (especially not in hot and humid Singapore), and it’s certainly not about mommy kissing Santa Claus. These have been added on through the years and for various reasons, and what they tend to do is to take away or mask the one reason for Christmas, and if we don’t strip that all away, we can end up thinking year after year, that Christmas is about those things. Well, if you want a good reason for coming to Church on Christmas day, it is to be able to take away all those trimmings and décor, take away all those layers and layers of added meanings, to come to the one main reason for Christmas so that we can leave Church with something that is basic, something that is at the very heart of the Christmas message.

And that message, that story, that truth, is that God wanted our humanity which we share in a broken and sinful way, to know that it is worth loving, that it is worth saving, and that it is has worth. Now if that present that you were given tells you that message, then it has done what it’s supposed to do. If that Christmas hug that you give, or have received imparts that message to you or from you, then you have given or have received Christmas. But do remember that it all started first with God giving us himself, embracing our humanity with his divinity on a very holy night, slightly more than 2000 years ago. This is the marvel of Christmas, and this is what we need to remember not just at Christmastime, but hopefully, every moment of our lives.

The incarnation was inconceivable before Christmas. God mixing right in with humanity was simply unheard of. But that which was unheard of, that which was so silently hoped for, was something that was made possible only by the grace of God when the Word, the hitherto silent Word, was made flesh. Back in 1947, when US Air Force test pilot Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, many thought that it was something to be marveled at.

What many don’t realize is that long before that, when the Word was made flesh, the sound barrier was broken by the Word himself - in a more incredible, inconceivable and, yes, silent way.

Blessed and Holy Christmas everybody.

What to do when there is no love

2011-12-18T16:00:00.002-05:00

Love makes the world go round. This can be a mushy sentiment carelessly tossed out by hopeless romantics, but it does have a certain truth in it.

Of course, they way that many people choose to define “love” can also be the cause of a lot of the world’s troubles and turmoils, but I won’t get into that in this blog reflection. But on many levels, the seasons of Advent and Christmas are indeed the seasons of love. However, I wonder if there are many out there who think this way.

After all, what was the world waiting for when it was being prepared for the coming of the Messiah, but arrival of someone who would change the world. Change what? Among many things, the way the world loved before. It needed a model of selfless love that would be the ultimate overturning of sin and selfishness that was the root cause of mankind’s miseries in life.

It was St John of the Cross, whose feast we celebrated sometime last week who said one of the most poignant things that one could say about love. In one of his writings, he said so profoundly “where there is no love, put love, and then you will find love”.

That is what God did in the incarnation. This is what Advent and the continuing season of Advent celebrates, if we want a succinct spirituality behind it. In our weak and selfish ways, we had been incapable of loving as God created us to love, and this required of God to show us just how to do it through an example par excellent. It was as if God was looking on in the world and could not find love in its pristine form. Dismayed and wanting to lead the world out of its mess, out of mercy, God decidedly put love into the world, and there found love.

While the world seems to be more intent on taking love, God reverses it and puts it in - in Christ. It’s as if the cogs of love were suddenly made to turn in the opposite direction, and it changed everything. The incarnation then becomes the love overturning everything that is the antithesis of love - hatred, envy, violence, revenge, selfishness, sloth, greed, and most of all, fear.

This then, has to be our shared quest as disciples of Christ. There are many places, I am sure, where you and I find little or no love. It’s far too easy to complain, criticize or to be cynical about it. If we do find love lacking there, our call is to, as John of the Cross said, put love in.

Then we will find love. Like God did. Have a blessed last week of Advent joy, everybody!

What happens when God keeps silent?

2011-12-11T17:01:00.001-05:00

One thing that our faith has always assured us of is God’s constant and unceasing love for us, his beloved. The last line of Matthew’s gospel (28:20) has Jesus reassuring the disciples before the great commission that he is with us always, yes, to the end of time.

That God protects and comforts us in our moments of need is a belief that we grow up with all our lives, if we have been baptized from birth. The sacraments of the Church are our physical signs of God’s presence in our lives, giving us assurance that in our deep moments of need, he is there to heal, feed, forgive, strengthen, bathe and minister to us. And because we are physical beings, these forms of God’s tangible presence gives us the assurance that we need in our darkest moments in a very real way.

But what if these are not enough? How do we handle it when our weak faith begs and yearns for an overturning of evil that seems to overcome us, and in a way, God has not delivered? I have come across many who in their faithful Christian lives, have had God remain so distant, almost cold and uninvolved in their dark moments of need. These are the times when the God of assurance and comfort appears to be something that has been taught about well, but when the real time of need comes, when there is unexplainable darkness, and when left to fend for oneself alone, when fear is a gripping reality, when all the ‘chips’ are down, the God of Jesus Christ speaks in a deafening silence that can break the strongest of hearts. What happens then?

At these tumultuous moments, almost anything that one says will sound trite and platitudinous, with hardly much to show viz-a-viz comfort and solace. Can God be playing games with us? Have we been believing in someone or something that had been a figment of our imagination? How is it that so many claim to really experience his saving help in their moments of need, but when we need God to make manifest his mercy, power and love, he seems to have gone to the Bahamas for a very long vacation?

Perhaps that is why we need to be constant in our definition of “faith”. Faith in God and his power and mercy is not that he will show up when summoned, or that he will overturn and overcome evil when petitioned for, but that deep within ourselves, we know that God and goodness prevails. Faith allows me to see that it may not be right now that God will show his divine triumph, but that he will. Faith doesn’t make me demand for a showing of the power of God, but that I believe in the power of God, despite what I see happening before my eyes. Faith assures me that I don’t have to see great things happening in my time, but rather, that I allow God to make great things happen in his time.

It dawned on me as I joined the congregation to profess our faith in the Creed at Mass this morning, that nowhere in the Creed, is there a profession that we believe in God who makes our life smooth, or that we believe in God who comes to our rescue when in trouble, or that we believe in God who cures all our illnesses and removes all our pains and hurts. Yet, the strange thing is that so many of us actually seem to make these demands on God, either outrightly, or tacitly. When we are 'faithful' in the truest literal sense of the word, we express how we define and clarify our faith. I am sometimes inclined to see that for many of us, when we say that we are 'faithful', what we could mean is that we have confidence that God will deliver. Which is it for you, the reader of this blog?

What is faith after all, but the ability to go beyond and to look beyond – beyond the disappointment, beyond the pain, beyond the failure, beyond the broken heart, beyond the unexplainable retarded inaction of those in authority, and beyond results. Faith is actually then made unnecessary when we see things happening in our time and in our way when it is petitioned for.

We can be sure that this kind of exercise of faith is going to be one of the toughest things we can ever experience in life, because it runs counter to our nature to want results and proof. Just like building on rock, it’s going to take time. The ability to live in this large way does not come overnight. It sees its foundations laid when we are toddlers in our faith life, and strengthened day-by-day, bit-by-bit, through an assiduous and committed prayer life. Then, when the wind blows, when the lights dim and the ground quivers, we will have terra firma to stand our faith on. It has been built on rock. But it is when we have done very little to lay those foundation blocks, that when crises loom on the horizon, that we find it so hard to call forth a faith that had hardly been built.

That last line in Matthew’s gospel is God’s assurance that he will be with us, not that he will show himself to us, and not that he will give us a life without trials and tension. Perhaps it is we who have read too much into it, and have made unreasonable demands on God.

Celebrating well requires great discipline

2011-12-04T17:00:00.001-05:00

The Christmas lights are up in the malls (much more so in Singapore than here in the USA, I am sure), the carols are incessantly being played through the Public Address system, the radio stations are churning out familiar Christmas tunes, the Salvation Army personnel stationed at the entrances of shopping malls are already ringing that little bell asking for your Christmas contribution into that tin, and the streets are decked out in the familiar red and green. It doesn’t take much to detect that Christmas is ‘in the air’.

But are we really in the Christmas season? One of my annual lamentations at this time of the year is how we fail miserably at being a people who really know how to celebrate something meaningfully and deeply. By the time 25th of December comes round, most of us would already have been to quite a few Christmas parties, eaten our fill of Christmas festive foods, politely turned down offers of Christmas Fruitcake for the umpteenth time, sung many Christmas carols, and perhaps even opened up our Christmas presents, so much so that when Christmas really comes, we tell ourselves we have indeed overeaten, and need to fast in order to lose some of those dreaded added kilos or pounds. The irony that most of us do not see is that we have actually feasted when we should have fasted, causing us to fast when we should in actual fact be feasting.

The problem that I see perhaps stems from the fact that we have developed a very poor sense of healthy anticipation and adequate spiritual preparation. We may call ourselves disciples, but there seems to be very little ‘disciplining’ in our lives. And this is not just for Christmas, but for so many other things or events in life. We have this tendency to short-circuit the waiting, training, anticipating and ‘mystery’ period of life, and because of this, often we end up being the cause of our own undoing when we find ourselves underwhelmed at the moments that we should be overwhelmed, blasé when we should be in awe, and struck dumb when we should be dumbstruck. The Book of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 gives us a scriptural framework from which we should order our lives. Those of us who remember songs from the 60s should be able to recall the song Turn! Turn! Turn! by the group The Byrds. They based their song on these verses from Scripture, which remind us that there is a season for everything in life. A time for giving birth, a time for dying, for tears, for laughter, etc. When we respect the time that we have for the proper things in life, we will know how to live well. But it is when we have dispensed all too happily (and too hastily) with any form of proper and adequate preparation, we are the ones who end up suffering and wondering why we are out of sorts at certain junctures of our lives.

One thing comes to mind immediately is how couples very often are too eager to live as if they are already married when they are in fact still single and not Mr and Mrs. Play or make-believe consummation has much more far-reaching negative effects than meets the eye. I sometimes refer to this as the act of opening of Christmas presents in June. When couples make no effort at all in refraining from physical intimacy during their courtship days, it cheapens the delight and surprise and specialness that they should be celebrating when consummation should actually be taking place (after the wedding). When Christmas presents are opened in June, and in July, August, and September, right up till Christmas, what happens on Christmas day is at best, going to be a sham or mock celebration, a put-on specialness, and feigned delight, cheapening not only the other and the self, but much more than that, making a mockery of the delight that God wants the union of man and woman to be.

When so many things are done in anticipation and brought to fulfillment in advance, our progeny will only pick up and learn from example. One erudite spiritual writer once said “presence depends on absence, intimacy upon solitude, play upon work”. There is a certain pentameter or rhythmic pattern that once broken and disrespected, causes a jarring not just to our ears, but to the minds of our spirits and indeed, our whole lives as well.

Training in this ability to wait comes from our earliest days. Parents need to impart the importance of learning how to wait well, to fast adequately, to dare to enter into uncomfortable silence and to dare to teach our children delayed gratification by example. Only when this is imbibed well can we truly celebrate well when it comes for time to respond with a joy that wells up from within.

So, perhaps for the coming two weeks before Christmas should actually be celebrated, fight the temptation – have that Christmas party during Christmastide instead, open the presents only after 25th December, and keep doing that right up till we observe the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord next year, when Christmastide really should end. And show the world that we really know how to celebrate Christmas, simply because we have also learnt to prepare well.

We have to learn how not to empty the well before its time. Because if that well is being emptied, drunk from and delighted in way ahead of time, we will be hard pressed to present anything to the Lord for him to change so that it can be the best tasting wine.

Getting out of God’s way

2011-11-27T17:01:00.000-05:00

What is the ‘spirit’ of Advent? What does the Church want us to enter into each time we begin the new Liturgical Year? I am quite sure that this is a question that many, if not all parish pastoral councils and pastors ponder at some length each year when planning for the way that the parish should be directed towards Christmas. I was speaking to a priest who lives with me in the Castle, and he said that in a parish that he went to yesterday, the theme for Advent was “Simply Christmas”, alluding to the fact that Christmas has become so complex and complicated, that there is now a conscious need to whittle away those veneers so that the real simple and awe-full reality of God’s incarnation can come to the fore once again. In a shopping-commercial-material world that this has spiraled into, something that simple does seem to make a lot of sense.

Traditionally, the four weeks of Advent have always been broadly given the underlying sub-themes of peace, hope, love and joy. What these are, are the foundations, the rock-bottom essence of life that give us an abiding stability amid life’s surges and swells. And we know this to be true, because it is when we are tossed about by life’s sadnesses, seemingly overwhelmed by its challenges, shocked by news of illness, failure and brokenness, or riddled with pain and torment, these are the ‘basics’ that we seek so that our rudders of life are not ripped apart from our navigation through the sea called ‘life’.

The person of faith needs to hold on to these because one realizes that one just cannot live life according to one’s own dictates, whims and fancies. The wanting to live life according to one’s own fancies and invent one’s own rudder is, I believe, the start of the mess of individualism and advent of atheism or godlessness.

Advent is a time to remind ourselves that we have a base for our existence, and that it is God who has given us this foundation. When we have masked over God with so much of ourselves, we can easily end up thinking that we are our finances, our successes, our families, our businesses, our material possessions and our securities. And it works for the other way as well – we can just as easily end up thinking that we are our failures, our broken relationships, our poverty, our sadness, our misery and our rejected selves. They are both the opposite sides of a coin called ‘self absorption’.

What Advent reminds us to do is to put away our ‘selves’ to prepare the way for God who has put away himself for us. Admittedly, this is one of the hardest things for us to do, whether we are rich or poor, failures or successes, healthy or sick. So much of our time and energies are centered on making us the most important people in the world, drawing either attention or sympathy, praise or pity to ourselves. This does nothing to align ourselves with the God who took on humanity to show us that selflessness is our shared goal in life.

Every sin that you and I can name and be guilty of finds at its base a certain selfishness that caused us to want things our way instead of God’s. The more we are aware of this, the less we will easily fall into sin in its incipient and hidden forms. This must be one of the main fruits of the spiritual life, where we develop a keen sense to ‘sniff’ out sin and detect just how odoriferous it really is.

So, in the coming weeks, apart from putting ‘up’ a lot in our lives, be they in the form of decorations, long lines at the cash register and perhaps even doctors’ appointments, it’s a very apt time to also put ‘aside’ a lot of ourselves to get out of God’s way, so that he can have a clear path to our hearts. After all, Jesus did say that he was the way, the truth and the life. Since he is THE way, we need to get our agenda, our egos and ourselves out of the way, so that his way also becomes our way.

The Kingship of Jesus in our lives

2011-11-20T17:00:00.001-05:00

Today, the Roman Catholic Church observes the last Sunday in the liturgical year A, and we anticipate a couple of things in the coming Sunday. Firstly, we look forward to a new liturgical year B with the celebration of the first Sunday of Advent. Secondly, and rather historically, we will begin officially using the new translation of the Roman Missal, which will take effect throughout the English-speaking world. So, whether one is going to be participating in an English Eucharistic celebration in Sydney, Singapore, Seattle or Shanghai, the Order of Mass of the Roman Rite will be in the new translation.

To be sure, there are thousands, if not millions who are in a tizzy about this change. Many aren’t even clear about why this is happening, let alone that it is happening (for those who have not been going to Mass for the past 6 to 9 months).

It’s not that it is a new Mass Order. It is a new translation of the Mass Order. “A translation from what?” you may ask. Well, it is a third translation of the Mass of Pope Paul VI, which we have been using all this while it was promulgated in 1969, after the Second Vatican Council. The version that we had been so familiar with all these past years is the second translation (commonly referred to as the Novus Ordo). The original text was in Latin, and we had been using the official English translation of it.

“What’s wrong with the old one?” you may ask. The common response to this from official and quasi-official bodies have been that it is not so much that it had anything wrong, but that the second translation (which most of us had grown up with) was very much a watered-down version, putting aside and losing a lot of the richness in worship-lingo and analog that the Latin had.

In his website, American Theologian Rev Fr Robert Barron recently gave a commentary on this, and I liked what he said, particularly about how the richness of the Latin had been lost through the loose and free translation of the Mass of Paul VI. Apparently, the Novus Ordo was rather hastily put together after Vatican II, so that the English-speaking world could get access to the Mass in English.

The Latin language had the ability to bring the congregation into the ambience of the royal court. With the Latin, we were made aware of the courtliness of being in the presence of the King of the Universe. But this whole mentality is completely lost in the English translation of the Mass of Paul VI. We only see glimpses of this when the Eucharistic Preface introduces the Sanctus, where we are invited to join the choirs of angels in their unending hymn of praise, whereupon we break into spontaneous “Holy, holy, holy Lord”.

Is it important to bring back regality? Isn’t it good to introduce simplicity and familiarity? I’m won’t be too quick to jump to an affirmative answer to these questions. As a priest who has tried in so many ways to impart to the people just how rich the Mass is, I think that the people in general are just not convinced that it is meant to be rich. Some have suggested that priests like I have injected into it what was not there. Perhaps they need to see phrases like “we beg” or “we beseech” actually in print to come to some sort of realization that we are not using ordinary language, because we are not addressing someone ordinary.

Where does this allergy towards high authority come from? There are many possible reasons. Perhaps some of them have something to do with the fact that in the past 40 to 50 years, many countries had freed themselves out of imperialism or control by foreign powers. The struggle and craving for independence had caused many to disdain any vestiges of ‘foreign influence’, and I can understand how the fight had left many scarred, battered and bruised. So, when the Novus Ordo was released with a lot of ‘everyday language’, it was seen as something fresh, pleasing to the ear, and most importantly, no longer with any traces of the loftiness that a direct translation would have rendered.

What is the current sentiment towards the new translation that is going to be implemented? Often, they run into the area of feelings. “I don’t feel like I am praying”, or “This is just so unnatural for me”, or “Why are we reversing, when we should be going forward”, or the more telling “I believe that we are making a terrible step back instead of progressing”. These sentiments, though very real, are unfortunately also very revealing. It tells of a generation that wants things to be done according to how they are feeling, and almost demands that things be “relevant” to THEM.

Is it any wonder then, that the Church has had a great deal of problems with worshippers turning up for Mass slovenly dressed and with nary a care for how they comport themselves, let alone interact and respect their fellow worshipper? Does it surprise me or anyone else that there are thousands of parishioners the world over who would say that it is ok to turn up for Mass in shorts and slippers or a tank-top, because God loves us as we are, and that clothes do not maketh the man? No. It doesn’t surprise me, because we have made ourselves and our comfort and our standards (which are anything but high) the centre of everything, including worship at Mass.

We need to be reminded over and over again that every Mass is a great invitation to meet the King of the Universe. It requires of us a different mind, a different attitude and a different heart to dare to contemplate and to share in His Divine life. The language that is used at Mass needs to help us to awaken to the fact that God is not on our level, and instead, draws us toward him. We are not meeting a mere familiar friend (though He is that AND more), someone we pay scant attention to, or worse, an indifferent and aloof personage who seems to be needy of our attention and worship. The more we are aware of this awesome (the word used here is deliberate) reality, the less we will be irritated about how different our language is in church, and become increasingly thankful for entering into mystery, almost welcoming the fact that we are privy to participate in this kind of worship language that is of a special nature.

The common phrase people who are resistant to change often use is “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Well, in this case, though it “ain’t broke”, it also wasn’t adequately done in the first place. That’s why it needs ‘fixing’.

The Solemnity that we celebrate today (yesterday for my Singaporean friends) is aptly called Christ the Universal King. We have been invited to kingship, but perhaps we have forgotten just how privileged we are. I pray that the spirit of the new translation of the Roman Missal will help ‘fix back’ our somewhat scattered royalty.

When leaving this life is seen as an invitation to be wowed

2011-11-13T17:02:00.001-05:00

One of the most painful things that one should ever undergo has got to be the loss of a parent, especially if one had been close to one’s mother or father in life. I am blessed to have both of my parents still around. Skype is a wonderful blessing indeed to somehow shorten the distance of being half a world away from them and from the comforts of home.

Why am I re-visiting the much written-about topic of death? Someone I had come to know in the past years, a genial, astute, elderly lady, passed away very recently after a having suffered a debilitating, massive stroke some eight months ago. The mother of a dear friend, I had been praying for her incessantly since her illness. On Friday, I was informed that she had died of a heart attack. It is most unfortunate that I cannot be there at the funeral liturgy, but I am hoping that this open reflection will make up for my absence in some small way.

It does seem strange that in many of my blogs, there seems to be a preponderance of death and dying, and some of my regular readers have asked why is it that I don’t write about happier things. It’s not that I am overly morose and maudlin. I can only respond that I am a realist, and death is the most real thing that can ever happen to us in life. The unfortunate thing about death is that though it is very real, we find ourselves hesitating to face its reality until it comes a-knocking on our doors. And when that happens, it’s often a tad too late to do some last-minute revision or recaps on letting go and release, because like an exam, we cannot be too prepared for the visit of what St Francis of Assisi calls Sister Death.

It does take a whole lot of preparation to have that kind of affinity and familiarity with death to give her a familial nomenclature like Sister. It surely doesn’t come overnight. But when well trained, what will happen is that we no longer see death as alien, foreign or even something to be silenced. We don’t do that with family. We embrace family (at least most of us do), we welcome family, and mostly, we enjoy the company of family. In order to see death with such welcome and amity, it necessarily means that we are confident that death brings us not just away from, but also somewhere toward. In Latin, “death” or “mors” is a feminine noun, and perhaps that is why St Francis gave her the title of “sister”, and not “brother”.

In order to prepare well for death, I believe that we must learn how to live well. Much as Catholics seem to have won the laurel wreath hands down when it comes to being guilt-laden in life, we are also not foreign to enjoying life. Catholic guilt has a quality all of its own, and some of us handle this better than others. I’m quite OCD when it comes to the art of delayed gratification, so that makes me an exception rather than the norm. But generally, God’s purpose is to have us enjoy the life that he has given us, and to enjoy this in a way that respects life, respects others, and gives deference to God. It’s when we mess this order up that problems crop up in life.

Mary (that’s her name) never got to receive the Lord in Holy Communion as she was baptized whilst in a comatose state from which she never recovered. She was later confirmed, and had received the Sacrament of Holy Anointing on a couple of occasions as well. In an ironic, poignant, and bittersweet strange way, Mary’s first Mass where she will be present as a baptized Catholic will also be her last. But it’s not the end. Each Mass that we as a community celebrate becomes then our conscious efforts at joining not just Mary, but with all the others who have gone before us with the great hope of that eternal banquet that is prepared by God.

Our faith gives us that great hope that we will share a meal again, a meal that transcends all meals in the meal that does not end.

In my current place of residence here called ‘the Castle’, there is an old Redemptorist missionary priest who is ‘getting on in years’. He is slowing down in his movements. Fr Tom said that he is getting ‘sluggish’ as of late. He moves slowly, needs a walking cane, and is hard of hearing at times, but he lights up when he is asked about his thoughts of death. Not afraid of dying, he has said time and again that anything we can ever say about heaven now will pale in comparison to its reality when we behold it. He said the other day “I am sure that there will only be one word that we will be able to say when we get there. It’s ‘wow’!”

I’m practicing my ability to be wowed each day. This must be one of the paths toward sainthood. Care to join me?

Holiness – preparing us for life’s Northeasters

2011-11-06T17:01:00.002-05:00

One of the questions that I have been asked about holiness and the quest for holiness was ‘why do we need to do this now?’

It comes from the mentality that since heaven is for eternity, that we would have eternity to do this, so what’s the rush? The following analogy has been used before – that we are all on a train heading toward a common destination, and we are in different carriages on that very long train called life. We can do all sorts of things on that train – some of us are maximizing our time doing a lot of good things, some of us are making sure that the train is well maintained, some are helping others on their journey, pointing out the various beautiful and interesting sights along the way, and some are just gazing, almost catatonically out into the passing world outside. And some of us are wondering what we are doing on the train. Of course, this analogy is full of theological problems, as it seems to imply that there is universal salvation for all no matter what happens (even for those who happen to jump off the train before it reaches its final destination). But if we were to put aside (albeit temporarily) this huge difficulty, the question of our individual need for holiness would be a good question to ponder.

Holiness is something that allows us to be true to our deepest selves, and reminds us of the great dignity that we hold within. It’s a bit like breathing. Without it, we would die. But we aren’t conscious of it all the time are we? Be honest – if your eyes hadn’t read that last line, you wouldn’t have suddenly made yourself conscious of the fact that you are breathing, or that breathing causes you to live. Our yen for holiness is like that, but on a level that is far more deep and intrinsic than merely being able to breathe. It is our reminder that we are images of not just humanity, but of divinity as well. When we are aware of the need to be holy, and to work toward eventual sainthood, we will slowly but surely, shrug off in our lives anything that detracts us from that goal.

But many people seem to have a warped sense of holiness. So many Christians I have met lament that holiness (in their minds) means that one no longer has the ability to enjoy life, while the truth is simply contrary to that. Proper holiness means that our choices in life become clearer and clearer – that we know that things that do not bring us to true life are precisely the choices that we should not be making. Holiness then is celebrating that we are shunning those choices rather than lamenting that we can’t choose them. Maturity is being truly able to celebrate this awareness. Immaturity is when we are still unhappy with this choice. A scriptural icon of this would be the elder brother of the prodigal son in the Story of the Prodigal Father.
Just as many have a warped sense of holiness, there are also who have a rather unclear understanding of forgiveness and mercy, which are crucial in our search for holiness in life, simply because unforgiveness puts a huge barrier between God and ourselves.

In my last blog, and the entire unfolding of what happened between two readers, there was a lack of understanding of what forgiveness is, what mercy is, and what the sacrament of reconciliation is, and is not. Some people even wrote personal emails to my email address to bemoan the fact that I have not kept private what was deemed to be ‘confession’ by some readers. From this episode, there is clearly a warped sense in many people about justice. Forgiveness is not a mere cheap cancelling out of a very necessary restitution. How convenient it seems to suddenly forget about having offended God in the first place! And this is even more glaring when scripture passages are almost slung at others so that what justice demands becomes ignored or conveniently side-stepped. Indeed, the best quotes from the bible do come from the devil himself.

I am aware that a blog of this nature can and is read by anyone from any part of the world (cyber or otherwise). The problem is that most people will be reading this from their ‘de’-formed catechesis, or what they think is Catholic teaching, and there is no way that I can address a commonly-held ignorance till it is brought up specifically. I suppose this is where I can address something as crucial as this.

A true sacramental confession is one where the penitent expresses a true contrition for the wrongs one has done, and goes before a priest physically (never in cyber space), and in the privacy of the confession which is a one-to-one encounter, whereupon one receives not only the absolution from the priest, but also a suitable penance to address the sinful act that had been committed i.e., made some form of restitution.

An email that is written anonymously to a priest, telling the priest what one has done (or worse, what one is heinously going to do the next day) does not a confession make. And it certainly is not something that the priest is held bound to silence, especially if its nature is evil and harmful to another human being. Of course, the classic situation posed in just about every course taught on the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the seminary is when a murderer (or a terrorist) confesses to a killing, and the question would be what the confessor would do - withhold absolution till he surrenders to the authorities? Not give the absolution at all? These possibilities come to mind. But that is a totally different matter altogether. We cannot ever make a confession in anticipation of a sin that is going to be committed later on. It simply leaves out the very important contrition that is such an essential part of the sacrament.

I realize that I cannot single-handedly correct such misconstrued thoughts and notions about the sacrament of reconciliation that exist out there. But you can. Yes, you, the reader of this blog, especially if you are a Catholic. You can, after having been catechized, albeit a little, by this entry, become the one who corrects the wrongly held opinions of your office colleagues, your children, your neighbour, your spouse, or whoever you know has either an erroneous or ignorant opinion about the kind of life that the Church wants to help us to lead.

I come back to our shared quest for holiness, as an inclusion to this post. Holiness, when sought correctly, helps us to buffer the storms that well up in life, as storms are wont to. It helps us to address upheavals in that proverbial train of life that we are on while the train rolls towards our shared destination in life.

Last weekend, most of the cities in the north east of North American received what is known as a Northeaster. This is when a storm travels from the south, and, converging with the cold air mass from the north, brings in an extremely cold air system down from the Arctic. Because of this, some places had their first snow in autumn.

But something terrible happened. The trees are still not fully denuded as we are still in autumn. The sudden accumulated weight of the snowfall on the leaves caused so many branches of trees to snap and give way and snap under the unnatural added weight of the snow. Many of these felled power lines, causing more than a million Americans to be deprived of power for up to four days.

But this doesn’t happen that much in winter because all the leaves of the trees would have been fallen by then, and much less snow would have accumulated on the denuded branches. It’s nature’s way of dealing with the storms she brings.

So too in our human ‘nature’. Our yen for holiness is what prepares us for those sudden Northeasters that blow from time to time in our lives.

Just as holiness helps us to ‘shed’ the excess baggage and drop the things that lug us down in life, its upside is that it helps us to have free hands to react to the things that can come our way in the most unexpected of times, and unexpected of ways.

On death and dying

2011-10-30T18:02:00.002-04:00

Every once in a while, it is healthy to set aside some time to ponder about where our lives are heading, and to really appreciate the fact that our life here on this earth is going to end some day. I think it was Woody Allen that said that he’s not afraid of dying. He just doesn’t want to be around when it happens. I wonder if he speaks not just for himself but for quite a lot of other people as well.

I’ve read about it in books and other people’s reflection when they describe the change in the seasons from Autumn to Winter, how the seasons themselves are nature’s reminder to everyone that life doesn’t remain static, but is on a constant change, where one season gives way to another. I guess, I am blessed to be able to experience this for myself now that I am in Washington DC, where we are in the middle of Autumn, and everywhere I turn, I see nature’s reminder that life is in transition. The leaves are all turning colour, as can be seen from the enclosed photograph of a tree that I passed on the way to school on Friday. The cold that is seeping into the north east of America is telling the leaves that it is time to stop the chlorophyll manufacturing that goes on in the leaves. This withdrawal causes the green chlorophyll to be stored in the trees, leaving behind the other non-green chlorophyll that gives autumn its characteristic colours of gold, red and orange. Soon, all these leaves will fall too, leaving nothing but the denuded branches to survive the harsh and cruel cold of winter.

The Church also has her own ways of reminding us of the transience of life around this time. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we celebrate two very special liturgies that serve as timely reminders of our fragility. On November 1, we observe the Solemnity of All Saints. It never fails to remind me that this is what we are all ultimately called to become, and this is really God’s grand plan for us all. We celebrate that there are millions who have gone before us who really have gone through life’s arduous journey and passed with flying colours. We don’t know how many such saints there are, but we know that there are many. Many more than there are canonized saints, for sure. For all we know, some of them are our very own blood ancestors who in God’s eyes, have lived the faith well, and have joined their lives with the life of Christ in the most concrete of ways.

Is it a high celebration? It certainly is, and there is great call for it to be. It is a celebration of heaven’s entire population whose cause for its existence is the generous and overflowing love of God. And it also reminds us that we are not alone in this journey of ours, no matter how few friends we may actually have. These unseen friends of ours are the saints who are constantly in God’s presence, and are praying for us so that our journey in life becomes as fruitful as theirs. They pray that we will make the right choices in life; that we will choose to love rather than hate; to respect rather than disdain; uplift rather than trod down; that we will put God before all else in life, and to know that no life on earth is not worth living. And they know that these choices are not easy choices because they consciously made those choices in their lives. So, though they are no longer with us, All Saints’ Day is really a celebration of life; a celebration of the Church Triumphant, as the Fathers of the Church called them.

The next day is another celebration of the Church as well, but that of the Church suffering or Church Expectant. These souls are in their purgative way to be readied for the beatific vision that awaits them. Too little has, in my opinion, been preached about the beauty and richness of the theology of Purgatory. If heaven is sublime, and it is, purgatory is next in terms of sublimity. It gives all who are there in that state of purification the greatest promise that heaven is indeed a blessed assurance. It is a day to remember at Mass all our deceased relations and friends whom we have shared many things with. With some of them we have shared joys, sorrows, meals, interests, surnames (as family) and our beds (as spouses) as well. Their passing from this life has left us with many a lacunae in our own lives. Our prayers and works of mercy carried out with their intentions become them our way of joining hands and hearts across the barriers that life and death have formed.
Some say that the Catholic Church is rather morose, citing these celebrations as dark and somber. I suppose if one were to use the wrong lenses to look at these celebrations, one could be left with a searing sense of ennui and languor. But what we need are the correct lenses so that the image of life that we get from these celebrations are uplifted and enlightened. I hope this blog entry gives this hope to all its readers.

Indeed, as the leaves on the branches of the trees outside my window turn from green to amber to gold, they will soon all fall to the ground when the last vestiges of life get sapped from them. The season is truly changing here. It was German theologian Karl Rahner who said that in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.

To Rahner's erudite reflection I venture to add this - as we we live our lives, let us try as best as we can to harmonise with those unfinished symphonies so that the completed chords can join with the choruses of angels in their unending symphony of praise.

Discerning God’s will

2011-10-23T18:00:00.005-04:00

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is a line from the Lord’s Prayer that millions and millions say, sometimes many times a day. We have heard the phrase “it’s God’s will” tossed around carelessly by people who have not even stopped to ponder what God’s will really is, and where we stand in the light of the will of God Almighty. Most of the time, the phrase “God’s will” is used as a cover-all when something becomes unexplainable and when the situation seems to demand that we make some sense of what lies before us, usually when a tragedy or calamity strikes. And uttering it in such a throw-away manner often may not bring anyone a step closer to where carrying out God’s will should – greater contemplation of God.

God really has only one will – that all creation respond positively to his invitation to eternal life and love with him for eternity. God wants all of creation to find our final home in him. That’s his ultimate will. Anything else that doesn’t lead us home, that distracts us from home, which makes us turn our backs toward home also turns us away from God’s will.

Jesus made it clear in the gospel passage where his disciples come to him and tell him that his family is ‘outside’ looking for him. We are told that Jesus looked at those seated around him ‘inside’ the house, and says, “Who is my mother? Who are my brother and sister?” And continues, referring to those seated around him, saying, “Here are my mother and sister and brother. Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my mother and sister and brother.”

Cryptic? Not really. He certainly was not dissing his beloved mother waiting ‘outside’. In fact, if you really think about it, he was giving great hope to all who were in that circle that they have a hope – that there is way in which those whom Jesus preached to, the ‘outsiders’, can also become as close as family to him – those on the ‘inside’ of his life. He in fact is saying, “you (i.e. tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners, etc) have a great hope that awaits you because if you listen to the will of God and do it, you are part of my family, and can find your way home”. What is family but a place where home really makes the heart grow fonder.

God’s will is about a home-coming. And it is much less about specifically naming what it is one needs to do concretely than about getting our ‘homing’ devices calibrated well. The less that we train ourselves to point our hearts and minds toward that home in God, the more we will find ourselves in all sorts of problems and difficulties in life.

What then is the antithesis of God’s will? Our will, especially when we are ‘will-full’. One of the greatest, if not THE greatest gift that God ever could give us is our free will. That he doesn’t force us or arm-twist us to love him, to worship him and to adore him shows that he is most secure. But that also shows us that our free and non-coerced response to love him, to worship him and to adore him becomes OUR best gift that we can ever give him, who has no need of any gifts.

Some people have asked me – “Father, how would I know if by choosing this path of life (e.g. taking this person to be my spouse, or accepting this job, or moving into this address, or taking this course of study, etc) I am doing God’s will”? There is no specific yes or no to such answers. It appears to some that seeking God’s will is akin to some kind of crystal ball gazing. It really isn’t.

Certainly, if there are a myriad of choices before us, we need to make some sort of decision, but this is where discerning comes in. With the help of a prayerful spiritual director, and being really honest with him, we can slowly whittle down the choices to a few which are more or less equally ‘good’, paring away those which are obviously wrong and immoral options.

What does honesty have to do with it? Plenty. We need to ask ourselves – in my choice of this ‘thing’ or this ‘task’ or this ‘pursuit’, am I out-rightly making a choice that is immoral and evil? Is it harmful to another person? Is it disrespecting human freedom, human life and human dignity or is it harming, stripping away of dignity, and curtailing the freedom of another person? Am I doing evil and not good? Obviously, if the answer to any of these basic questions is ‘yes’, it is clear as daylight that we are not going anywhere near ‘home’ but completely away from God’s will. The problem is that there are many people out there whose moral compass are out of whack and in dire need for recalibration, but are in complete denial about it. These are the people who are not only out to hurt and deform others, but are also hurting and deforming themselves.

In fact, the gospel text at Mass yesterday hearkens us to be mindful of the call to love God in the way that every Jew is to love the Lord our God - with all our mind (ie, with a clear and knowing conscience), with all our soul (ie, from our deepest depth of our being) and with all our strength (ie, with a determination that sees us purposefully choosing to love, and not be led by feelings and fleeting emotions).

I just came across a funny story where the father was commenting on his son’s handyman skills as he watched his son using a hammer to bang in a nail into a wall. He said, “wow, you use that hammer like lightning!” to which the son beamed with pride, thinking the father commended him on his speed. The father smiled and said “and like lightning, you never strike the same place twice!” Helping one another to do God’s will is also like helping one another to strike for ‘home’ all the time.

Am I being nostalgic when I write that doing God’s will is ultimately about finding our way ‘home’? Perhaps. After all, I am some 15,600km away from home and it does make me think of home on a frequent basis. But the physical distance from Singapore is really nothing compared to how far I really am from my real home in God if I am not constantly re-examining if I am doing God’s will with all my mind, my soul and my strength.

Ending up the real losers when we want pain to end too fast

2011-10-16T18:01:00.000-04:00

We share in our human psyche an energy that repels, abhors and rejects pain, trauma and suffering. It’s something that all of us share as human beings. Of course, there are the minority who actually like suffering and pain, and look for ways not only to have pain in their lives, but to have it in ways that are bizarre and totally unconventional. While calling these people psychologically maladjusted and weird seems a tad unkind and generalising, a lot of these behaviours are no doubt really self-destructing. I recall watching a documentary some months back about people who subject themselves to strange rituals that inflict pain, and the conclusion was that those people were actually sought the ‘high’ that comes from the pain, and had not really sought the pain for pain’s sake.

Here in the States, one only needs to watch one segment any television commercials, and one will encounter a slew of ads for painkillers offering some form of pain relief, from back-pain, to muscle-aches to headaches. It makes me wonder if this nation is obsessed with numbing or escaping some sort of pain and discomfort as a whole. It’s not necessarily a bad thing I guess. After all, people are known to work or studies better if they are rid of their stabbing nerve aches or back pain. I cannot but laugh silently to myself whenever I see these commercials, because half of the commercial is spent on spewing out at breakneck speed the possible side-effects that these pills and medicines can have on the consumer, often with the words ‘cancer’, or ‘high blood pressure’ or ‘death’ mentioned. It is obvious that medication is never without its risks. But the caveat emptor is always there to protect the seller.

But there are, to be sure, other kinds of pains that are not easily treatable with medication - oral or otherwise. These are the pains that come with life. The disappointments of broken friendship and relationships, the failures of endeavours that started out with every good intention, the reality that a good outcome in most things necessarily entails hard work and sacrifice, and the fact that in life, one is not going to be loved and accepted by everybody. From our Catholic vista or perspective, I guess there is one phrase that is a cover-all for this – redemptive suffering. It gives us as a Body of Christ, a sacred way of dealing with these pains when they come along. And it entails that we constantly remind ourselves that this life is not just for ourselves, and that we are not in the world, existent in the universe for ourselves. There is a bigger and far more immense reality than meets our tiny eye.

That Jesus came into our humanity to share in it in the most real and vivid way shows us that each of our sufferings can have a transformative character, if only we would have the same attitude that Christ had. Our sufferings won’t be transformative (for ourselves or for anyone else, for that matter) if we are not willing to consciously join our sufferings with sufferings of Christ. Because his suffering was universally redemptive, our sufferings would also have (at least in some tiny way) some redemptive value for the world. But sitting in pool of self-pitying mud and wallowing in it has little if no redemptive value at all.

Of course this is far easier said than done. Even when I am in a period of pain and uncertainty, when it is dark (perhaps even literally, as in the coming long dark winter months), I do sometimes want it to end, and to end swiftly. What we often cannot appreciate is that there is a learning that comes with staying in that pain, with journeying with that load, and with the sitting in the darkness in patience and solitude. Strangely, it is when we expedite our exit from these moments too quickly with whatever panacea we can get our hands on, that we really end up cheating ourselves from a much better result if we had only waited and learnt patience and some form of ascesis. That’s when we need to pray as Jesus did at Gethsemane ‘Father, take this cup away from me, but if it is your will, let it be done, not mine’. We have not learnt deeply enough that in life, quick fixes are often only a temporary solution (or welcome distraction) that do not bring much conversion and metanoia to our lives.

Most of us do not live in the luxury of being pain-free in all areas of our lives. We struggle and cope with some form of pain and discomfort on some level, but some of us just either don’t admit it, or talk about it. Whether we do or not does not matter. What really matters is that we challenge ourselves to grow more and more spiritually mature when faced with these pains and sufferings.

Each 40-day period of Lent and the 5 weeks of Advent are a very real reminder to us that there is going to be a period of waiting, a period of ‘gestation’, and a period of patience-learning in life before life really can be celebrated in its fullest joy.

No, life as a Catholic Christian is not about being a self-inflicting, pain-seeking masochist. In fact, it is just the other way around. It is learning to see with a different set of eyes what goodness can be seen in dimness when we adjust to a new level of light, illumined by the light of Christ.

How badly do we want this?

2011-10-09T18:01:00.000-04:00

On the television right now are several talent shows from different continents. I think they are both called the X-Factor, with one being held in the UK, and the other, here in the USA. After the huge audition rounds, the next step is what is called ‘boot camp’ followed by ‘judges’ houses’, where the competitors are jetted to some exotic location somewhere far from where they live, and go through yet another round of very tough judging from another group of judges together with the usual four. When these competitors come to face the judges in their houses, they are often asked one question before launching into their song, and it is this – ‘tell us, how bad(ly) do you want this’, to which the contestants are wont to say “oh, you wouldn’t believe just how much!”

Much as it is a predictable response from these celebrity hopefuls, what lies behind the question is the fact that wanting all the trappings of success on the celebrity scene comes with it a truckload of difficulties, challenges and heartbreaks that no one seems to envisage before they get it. As I study theology, and deepen my spiritual insights on life and the great challenge that Christianity poses to every one her believers, it is clearer and clearer to me that this question is also asked of each believer at various times of one’s life.

What is our ultimate aim in life? What are all our hopes and aspirations and dreams and endeavours as we live this life? Oh, I am sure that many will respond that it really depends on what we want in life – some of us are family centered, and want that to be the ultimate aim in life; some are so contented to be married and to have each other as spouses to see them through the days of their lives; some are career minded and want to really go as far as they can to succeed in their jobs. And I am sure there are many, many other ‘options’.

Though these are not bad per se, for us Christians, we cannot but remember that beyond these things, which are good and wholesome (at least we hope they are), we all have one common aim and goal in life, and that is to love and serve God first and to be with him in the next life. That familiar first question of the Baltimore Catechism puts it in the proverbial nutshell.

Knowing that well and having it engrained in us will set us right in our relationships with one another, and with the way in which we interact with nature and the world, and all that is in it. The problem is that even as Christians, not all of us are convinced that this is the fundamental imperative and so, we set all sorts of different priorities and agendas in our lives, oftentimes clashing one with the other, causing a whole gamut of stresses and anxieties. Yesterday’s gospel text of the rejected invitation to the wedding banquet uses those excuses as an analogue for our own excuses why we often find ourselves not wanting to respond wholeheartedly to the offer of the divine life by the one who is Divine.

But I can also see that an inadequate understanding of what it means to love God as the number one love can do to many who think they understand what this entails. Many think that it means that they have to abandon their families, be underachievers in their workplaces, and live consecrated lives, and to forego happiness and pleasure in life. That is a false or misunderstood definition of what holiness is. Holiness is not saying “I can’t do that, or do this now”. It is “I can see the pleasure that this gives me, but I can also see that there is a greater, more perduring pleasure that I should be aiming for, and I will take great efforts to choose that with my will and intellect”. Of course, that ‘struggle’ is what each one of us faces every time our lives come to any sort of crossroads that requires of us to make a decision of where we should be going; what road we should be taking.

I would certainly hope that catechumens in the RCIA would be as enthused as some of those X-Factor contestants before significant moments in their journey of metanoia and formation. Would they respond with such deep conviction that those contestants have and say “Oh, I want this so much! I eat, sleep, and drink this – it means my life”.

Because that would be what loving God with one’s whole mind, whole soul and whole strength means.

So, how badly do you want this?

Forgetfulness – the reason why many fall into sin and error

2011-10-02T18:01:00.001-04:00

What sets us apart from the other animals and sentient beings are the gift of our intellect and our wills. This is an undeniable fact. This combination sets us head and shoulders above the animals.

What is our greatest gift is really also a double-edged sword. Whilst our intellect can grasp and comprehend in ways that are deep and profound, it is when we forget our giftedness that we sometimes end up living beneath our dignity as well. Forgetfulness can often be one of the root causes of sin.

What makes a saint is not that one has been sinless. What makes a saint is the realization that one is a sinner who needs to be standing under the brilliance of God’s mercy, and one has never allowed the self to forget that. The unrepentant sinner, however, is one who has forgotten how to be grateful for life, and harbours grudges and ill-will to many around oneself, being callous with words and unthinking in actions that end up hurting and wounding. Sometimes, the innocent parties in one’s life suffer the most from such actions. The saint is one who sees and realizes that nothing is possible without the tender mercy of God, and is constantly reminding oneself of how much grace awaits one if one only asks for it.

The forgiven sinner constantly remembers. The unrepentant sinner easily forgets. The former needs no particular reason to be thankful. The other only waits till a ‘good enough’ occasion comes about to do so.

It is a fact that the Internet has made our world a much smaller place, and my experience of being half a world away from home has made me appreciate this in a concrete way daily. Each evening at 6pm here in Washington DC, I get to download a copy of the Straits Times onto my iPad, and I am able to receive the day’s news at the very same time that Singaporeans get theirs in print form. I am not sure if it was coincidental, but I did notice that in both Saturday’s and Sunday’s edition, that there were two articles that featured the element of death and love.

While Saturday’s edition spoke of Rose Parties, Sunday’s edition featured an article written by Lee Wei Ling reminiscing about her mother. Cutting across both Rose Parties and Ms Lee’s stories are the elements of mortality, emotion and love – three things that feature richly in our human living experiences, three things which are often the fundament of what constitutes a deep and meaningful life, and three things which many do not really know how to deal with adequately and appropriately either.

I do not intend to critique these two articles in any way. I am sure that many have been touched by them, and want to do something about their relationships with their loved ones after reading them. If so, that would be something good that has come out of such articles. But there is something else that lies much deeper that causes most of us to need something like death to remind us the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of our lives and our loves. It is this – our shared sense of forgetfulness and how easy it is for us to be ungrateful in life.

The Catholic faith has always been helping her members to cultivate an ongoing sense of gratitude for above all things, God himself. It is called the Eucharist. Its etymology is from the Greek Eucharistia, which means ‘thanksgiving’. But I wonder how many Catholics enter a Church for the celebration of Mass with that purpose in mind – to be thankful. Many do go with petitions of some sort on their minds and in their hearts. And with the approaching of the school exams in Singapore, it’s a safe wager to make that good examination results are a common unsaid petition.

But one doesn’t need to have had one’s prayers answered in order to be thankful. Could our ‘business’ or ‘quid-pro-quo’ attitude in life cause us to see that only if God does something extraordinary for us that causes him to ‘deserve’ our thanks after that? It would be sad if we need constant reminder after constant reminder to be people of gratitude. I suppose, articles like the two mentioned can jolt our selective memory. Some are reminded to be grateful after attending retreats, reading spiritual books, having good ‘soul’ friends, reading meaningful articles or even getting a doctor’s prognosis that doesn’t seem terrible positive. But if these remind us to be grateful people for the kindness shown to us in life, they will go a long way to help us to be saints, or at least, be saints in the making.

So, why should we be thankful at Mass? Not just for what God has done, certainly. For who he is, and for who we are. We forget that too easily, and that is the cause of most of our sinfulness. We share a certain spiritual dementia that causes us forget we are made in the image and likeness of the one who gave us life in the first place. If going for daily Mass doesn’t inculcate in us a spirit of gratitude for everything (and everyone) in life, we would have been missing the forest for the proverbial trees.

The deserts of our lives – a place where God can speak to our hearts

2011-09-25T17:22:00.005-04:00

The school that I am currently studying in as well as my accommodation (affectionately known as the Castle) which is just a stone’s throw from each other here in Washington DC, are within crawling distance from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. I have visited it on several occasions, and try to concelebrate the Sunday morning Mass there when the weekend comes. Entering this Basilica always gives me a sense of going into the heart of Mother Mary, where she places me together with her beloved Son, Jesus.
One interesting nugget of information that I found out about this shrine was that this was the place that Dorothy Day, the devout American Catholic convert and social worker, came to in the 1920s on a day trip out of her native New York City to get some help from the Lord. She was at her lowest, after having given birth to a baby girl, became Catholic, and an unwed mother. The man she was with at the time was a staunch opposer to all forms of religion. Dorothy chose God over this man (a very tough choice, as can be imagined), and found herself at this time very much alone. Apparently, in her biography, she told of how she spilled her very being out to the Lord in that particular shrine, and how she felt that she was in a desert all alone. Did the Lord take her out of the desert right there and then? You’d hope. But no, this was no Hollywood story. She had to hop back on the train to take her back to New York City (it’s about a four hour train ride from here) but it was only when she was back there that she met Peter Maurin who was to be the one who would help to start the Catholic Worker Movement with her in 1933.

What struck me about this story was that Dorothy Day described herself as being in a desert at that point. Desert moments occur in just about everybody’s life. When we are abandoned and lonely, we are in deserts. When we are betrayed and feel forlorn, we are in deserts. When we encounter failure and rejection, we are in deserts. When we get misjudged and abused, we are in deserts. Desert moments come also at the least expected of times. When loved ones get ill and their earthly end looms in the horizon; when we want to do God’s will and it seems the hardest thing to be happy to do; when those we put our faith and trust in, return it with infidelity and a whole basket of hurt feelings. These are desert moments that so many of us can connect with.

The difference between a faith-filled person and one who is faith-less, is the way that they handle their desert moments when they come. The faith-filled person will try to look beyond the pain and the sorrow of the moment, and open up to the Lord, like the way Dorothy Day did in the National Shrine back then when everything was breaking apart. The faithful person will try to not make her pain and her loneliness the heart of the universe, and dare to even ask God what is it that she should be learning from this whole experience. The faith-filled person will try one’s best not to blame and shame others, tempting though it may be. It is a tough decision to make, because it means not telling God what to do when the proverbial chips are down. It is very easy to make God our servant and give him a ‘to-do’ list and perhaps even have a ‘to-be-done-by’ date at the bottom.

People who lack faith will do one or more of the following – blame one’s spouse, one’s children, one’s parents, one’s employers, one’s superiors, one’s unhealed past memories, and perhaps the most common one of all, blame God. After all, he is the best scapegoat since he doesn’t retaliate in any violent way. At least not most of the time.

To be fair, I don't think any of us are totally one way or the other. I know I'm not. The reality is that we waver between these poles. Sometimes we do better at being faith-filled, and sometimes we are at the other end. Just as sometimes the desert can be a very hot place, and sometimes a freezing hell hole.

The desert in the scriptures is a place of great foreboding. In the Near Eastern mind, it is a place where the devil roams and inhabits. That is why Jesus was sent to the desert after his baptism – to encounter evil and to begin that great battle that was to be the story his life, and the greatest story ever told. But we need to also know that it was the Holy Spirit that sent Jesus there. God did not send him there alone and without a comforter. His love for the Father and his Father’s will gave him the strength to go to the desert with a confidence and a trust that he would be alright despite the battles that would be fought there.

When we find ourselves in the desert alone, we need to reclaim our baptismal dignity and remember that firstly, we have never been without the Holy Spirit in our journey in life, and secondly, like Jesus after his third temptation, we too, have our Guardian Angels to ‘light and guard, to rule and guide’.

And of course, though I had made reference to this before, it bears repeating here. In the book of the Apocalypse, to escape the foreboding dragon, Mary was given refuge in a desert. That is not what a desert is for. No one in the right mind would flee to a desert for refuge from danger. Yet, God’s ways are often not ours. It is precisely in the most unlikely of places that we will find the most unexpected of graces.

I do have my bouts of surreal homesickness now and then. I find myself low in spirits when I realize just how far I am from home and family, or when I glance at my watch and realize that everyone in Singapore is fast asleep as I am warming up to a cup of tea in the afternoon in the cold DC weather. This is when I go to the roof of the Castle, and have a very good view of the dome of the National Shrine before getting my nose buried back in the books. Sure, it may not be much of desert experience compared to those of others, but the desert takes all forms when it comes. (That's what I see from the roof of my 'castle'. In the foreground is the back portion of my school)

One doesn’t need to have the Basilica as one’s neighbour to find comfort in desert moments. Rather, what one needs is really the faith to enter the desert with a new resolve, knowing that one is not alone.

Mercy, death and dying – time to “up” the heat.

2011-09-18T18:03:00.000-04:00

Death and dying are things that many people don’t like to talk about or think about very much. The saying that there are two things that are certain in life – taxes and death – is probably very true, but still, the topics of death and dying seem to be taboo. Yes, this holds true even for Catholics who believe in the promise of the resurrection of the dead.

As a priest who had been in the parish and active in ministry for the ten years before coming over to the States, I was constantly reminded of how fragile life really is, especially if I was the presider at a funeral liturgy, and even much more so if I had journeyed with the person before his death. If there is one thing that I miss in active ministry it is funeral masses. To be sure, weddings are lovely and beautiful, but I am still quite unconvinced that many couples really are deeply aware of the true vocation that marriage really is, and what God is really calling them to as a sacrament. It’s a common lament among priests – that much as we can talk and instruct and guide couples about marriage and its deep meaning, many of them are just too polite to ask further, or too caught up in the ‘romance’ to be awed by God’s part in this relationship. Most of the time, the deeper significance of how God is present to a couple in marriage comes much later in their married life. I guess this is where marriage enrichment programmes like Marriage Encounter come in. Apart from marriages, there are baptism liturgies and first communion liturgies, which are part and parcel of parish life that I do miss as well. But I must say that it is the funeral masses that I find most meaningful and also most challenging to ‘celebrate’ well, and yes, something that I do miss.

Why this is felt strongly by me is because I have come to see that very often (of course there are exceptions) it is when we are at these ‘life border’ situations that we come face to face with death, especially with the death of a close relative, a spouse, a child, a parent or a dear friend, that something opens up. At these liminal-space moments, one can hardly turn one’s gaze away from just how fragile life really is. Many a time, I have found that these are moments where a person becomes receptive to life, to love, and to reality. Life as it is lived now at this breakneck speed provides too many ways to escape from the depth and meaning of life. I am not a party pooper, but if our life is just one big party after another, one high after another, one thrill after another, one titillation after another, it is when these are brought to a halt that one begins to see another side of life that asks one to search for meaning and depth. These times are the tender entry points for God to enter through a portal of one’s life which hitherto may have been stubbornly closed shut, and where the words “mercy” and “forgiveness” had hardly been on the list of one’s everyday vocabulary.

I have found that when I spend some time at funeral wakes to speak to family members, that they begin to “loosen up” their view that the Church is ‘stuffy’ and ‘officious’, much more so when the death was a result of an apparent suicide. In a multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Singapore, particularly in some races, there will be a very mixed crowd that gathers at the funeral liturgy, and this becomes a most excellent time to broach the topic of the gift of Divine Mercy that Jesus is for all of us. There is bad form and good form at these liturgies, and bad form would include saying that the deceased is now an angel; or that God needs Grandma more than we do now; or that Aunt Sally is now a saint in heaven (because we are not the Congregation for the Cause of Saints), among other things. Good form is preaching about the promise of the resurrection, the need to continue to pray and offer up penance and petition for the soul of the deceased, the hope that our Christian faith gives us, and the meaning of the many liturgical symbols that one sees surrounding the casket and in the sanctuary. They all give great hope for us at the time of separation and grief.

Ultimately, it is mercy that we have been given by God to have enjoyed life (because God could very easily choose not to create us, but he did), and it is mercy that makes it all possible for us to be united with him after we have lived our lives on this earth.

Some of us are not as blessed as others. Most of us have been surrounded by friends who love and support us in life. But some of us may have people who are just bent on making our lives miserable and full of suffering. What does the Christian do when one is plagued with these “itches that cannot be scratched”? I think one of the greatest things we could ever do to those who do harm to us, those who hate us, those who curse us, those who wish evil on us, those who misjudge us, is to pray for these people that they will receive God’s mercy. Cursing them would be to lower ourselves to their level, and certainly not something worthy of Christian action. Jesus told us to bless those who curse us, and forgive those who curse us. This is perfection in God’s eyes, and we should all aim for perfection. Anything less would be an insult to the One whose image and likeness we are made in.

How should we best prepare for death? By being merciful, because this hones our ability to be appropriate receivers of Divine Mercy when it is shown to us. We can’t get ready overnight. We need a whole lifetime of priming so that when it comes our time to receive God’s Mercy, we will recognize it for the amazing grace that it is.

It’s a bit like getting the centralized heating working when the cold winter approaches. Now I know that this is something Singaporeans would never associate themselves with but bear with me. Here in DC, the warm summer days are over, and temperature is dropping each day. Mike, the Maintenance Manager of our “castle” shared with me how the central heat gets working in winter. There are miles of radiator pipes that send the steam generated from the boiler in the basement throughout each room, each hallway and each bathroom of this immense place. Apparently, this needs to be done slowly, in increments of half hour segments for about three weeks before it can be fully operated, because a sudden surge of super-hot steam through pipes that were not used for the past nine months would surely cause them to burst.

As Mike shared this with me, I immediately saw its link with mercy. We need to keep opening our pipes of mercy regularly, offering them to others, so that when God’s mercy comes full at the end of our lives, we are ready to receive all that God wants to give us.

Attracting God’s attention

2011-09-11T18:01:00.001-04:00

On one of those rare occasions this week, I had a rare moment of rest time from my studies, and wandered into the common room of the castle of my residence. I fumbled with the switches and the TV’s remote control, I did the American thing – channel surfed. It was mind-boggling how many channels the cable TV has. Literally hundreds.

Of course, there were education channels where there were good history programs and documentaries, which were very interesting to watch, but at the other end of the spectrum was what I would call pure trash and offered nothing but visceral delights. But what I found most amusing were their infomercial channels, where product after product being sold offered promise after promise of making one a happy person in various areas of one’s life. Gadgets for the home promised a more convenient lifestyle, products for the body promised health with little or no discipline needed, and products for beauty promised the ability to get the attention of the opposite sex almost without even trying. Perhaps there should be a product that promised Americans jobs, which is something this country seems to be in dire need of. But the bottom line of so many of these products lies the selling point, sometimes clear as a bell, sometimes very subliminal – this is the way to get others to find you attractive, and you will be happy.

If we spend so much time and effort in trying to get others to accept and like us in life, by searching for that correct fragrance, wear that correct dress, have that accepted body shape, live in that correct address or drive that correct car, do we ever spend time pondering what it is in life that would make us become attractive to God. Well, to many, I suppose, this question would be nonsensical, but for various reasons.

The atheist would say God doesn’t exist, so it’s a non-question. The spiritual person would say that one doesn’t need to anything to be attractive to God because God loves us all, and has no condition to his love. And there would be the many between this spectrum who hold the view that some things we do can make us more attuned to God and some can lead us away from him.

In my “Inner Way” course that is one of my electives, one of the things that we have discussed is what our spiritual lives mean to us as human beings. The purpose or rationale of a Spiritual Director is to guide one to reach that path of life so that our deepest meaning can be uncovered, and our path to that can be less covered.

I was glad to hear Abbot Lee (that’s his title and name, and no, he is not Chinese) say that it is mercy that lies at the heart of God, and it is that merciful heart that we should ultimately be in union with. In other words, we come closest to God and his merciful heart when we honestly admit of our need for his mercy.

What comes to mind is the parable that Jesus told in Luke 18:9-14. In that story lies the secret to the heart of God, and what makes us attractive to him.

You see, it’s not all the ways that we have not sinned that makes us attractive in God’s eyes, because if that were the case, we will have merited heaven on our own accord, inflating in no small way our huge egos that would hinder us from entering the doorway to heaven (not that heaven has a doorway). But it is just the opposite, when we have sinned and realized that we have sinned, requiring us to ask nothing more from God but his tender mercy, allowing us to dip our parched souls in the pools of his life-giving waters that stream from his heart, that enables us to be ‘attractive’ to him. In fact, it is when we see who we are and stand ‘a distance away’, and not raise our eyes to heaven in a stance like that of the publican, that precisely brings us closer to heaven and let heaven come to our eyes.

I don’t think many of us get that at all. And so, we spend most of our time jumping the hoops, and trying to get God’s attention by our deeds and works and fulfilling of obligations. No, it’s not that these are bad. In themselves they are good and very needful, but if we forget why we do them, and fail to consistently remind ourselves the rationale for doing them, we can easily end up thinking that we are doing them SO THAT we get God, rather than BECAUSE God has ‘gotten’ us first.

And no, I am in no way advocating that we lead sin-filled and lives of debauchery either, erroneously reading Rom 5:20 to our seeming advantage. Just because where “sin abounds, grace abounds even greater” does not mean we should live in sin with wild abandon.

It must be the awareness of this that as Church, when we gather for the Eucharistic meal, we need to begin with that stark, honest and humble acknowledgement of “Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison”. It is our universal cry for God’s infinite mercy that throws light on our darkened souls that enables us to enter correctly (and in the correct light) into the banquet hall of love.

And that makes us very very attractive to God.

100th Blog entry

2011-09-04T18:15:00.005-04:00

Dear readers and friends

The blog entry that you read posted just before this one (scroll down please) marks the 100th blog entry in this endeavour that I started on October 8 2009. "One entry every Monday morning" - that was my aim. It is with God's grace that I have kept that up with a modicum of regularity . No, it was not about me. I wrote it to keep the Catholic mind thinking, and to invite readers to grow in their search for meaning and for God, a search that never really ends. It just gets deeper.

Thank you, dear readers, for making this both a joy and a challenge to me. There were great moments of insight and grace, comments of support and love, and I must admit, in the past few weeks, some abuse as well (for various reasons, I could not post those that were out rightly abusive and threatening) that was unbecoming of true Catholicism and rather upsetting. I must say that I had never thought it possible that a priest blogger who tries to be as gentle as possible with words in the blog can be vilified and targeted for abuse.

And no, I will not allow the use this blog to be a means to communicate to other readers any messages of hate and threat and violence of whose god is better or stronger than whose. We are not in kindergarten anymore. I simply will not post any comments that are seditious and inflammatory in nature. As most of you know, there are laws against this.

But if you are interested to adult dialogue, please give me your contact email, or identify yourselves, and I will be most pleased to communicate with you. Your identity will not be revealed in my blog. It is far too easy to hide behind anonymity in the cyber-world when one wants to throw stones. This blog space is not a place for violence of any nature. I hope you respect this. Yesterday morning’s Gospel text at Mass reminded me how to treat such persons – like tax collectors and Pharisees. Well, Jesus loved tax collectors, and called them to grace. Matthew himself was a converted one. This I believe I must do - imitate Jesus as far as possible.

But on to happier things - I had the intention of doing some sort of celebration gathering for the 100th blog anniversary, but alas, I had to be moved from Singapore and could not possibly hold any gathering with my readers. But I do hope that you will continue with your journey with me and come to re-appreciate in deeper and better ways a journey that takes us to God’s heart – a heart beating with love for us all.

Thank you once more for your kind and faithful readership. This is not my celebration. It is ours, and God love you all!

Happy 100th everyone!

Fr Luke

Communication - is it our stumbling block to God?

2011-09-04T18:00:00.002-04:00

The 13th century Persian poet Mevlana, or more commonly known as Rumi, has a poem called Unseen Rain, where one of the stanzas reads “What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached”. I do often wonder if we too, have lived too long where we can be reached.

When I came across this line, I felt my attention frozen somewhat, because I do personally feel that this is one of the greatest problems that affects all of us living in the era of the super-fast mass communication, aided by the advent and incessant use of the internet and the communication highways that we are on daily. Even if we are aware of its apparent drawbacks and negative impact to our soul, we are almost too deep into it to pull ourselves away from it to, as it were, recover from being too easily reached and to really rediscover our selves.

But I must begin by saying that there is a wonderful and positive side to the communication ease. In fact, this very blog that your eyes are reading through your computers or android phones is possible because of this information highway. Without it, there would be no blog, and nothing I have had to say would be read by people living halfway across the globe. The information superhighway has enabled us to gain so much more in terms of knowledge and to do research that hitherto would have taken a far longer time to complete. It allows us to communicate with ease and great economy with friends, loved ones and family who live thousands of miles away. It is so inexpensive to call my family members who live in Singapore from where I live in Washington DC that I can even call them just to check in on them daily, and to reassure them of my well being, and to get assurance of theirs, at the rate of about 2 cents a minute. It does make the world a much smaller place.

But having said that, I also believe that being too easily reached, as Rumi wrote, does have its downside, which we hardly reflect on. What amazes me is that Rumi wrote that in the 13th century, way before then advent of any form of advanced communication. He was not bewailing the speed of communication. What he was bemoaning was the fact that we human beings have a tendency to want to run or escape from things that give us depth, especially when we know that depth comes when one removes oneself from the noise and distraction that the world gives, whether one is immersed in the modern day helter-skelter world of gadgets and gizmos, or living in 13th century Persia. We have a certain allergy and hesitancy to reach our centre, and to come to love what is deepest inside of us.

I am currently reading a fascinating book entitled Poustinia – Encountering God in Silence, Solitude and Prayer by Catherine Doherty, the founder of the Madonna House Apostolate. It tells of the humble beginnings of this movement which tries to cater to the need for people to “stand still and allow the deadly restlessness of our tragic age to fall away like the worn-out, dusty cloak that it is”. No, she was neither a hater of modernity, nor an advocate against the cyber-age. But she was given a grace to see that we human beings share a certain yen for the search for God within, which the world without can easily block or remove from our consciousness.

In my Thomistic Seminar course that I am currently ploughing through, I am reminded once again that the aim of our moral and spiritual lives, which is not at all separated and distinct from our daily physical lives, is the final participation in God’s wisdom, where contemplation is reached. We forget this, and this is made even more easily forgotten when we only think that our world is about our work, our health, our families or our achievements. A whole lot of 'do, do, do', but very little 'be'. Not that these are bad in themselves, but our involvement in them need to lead us to appreciate where their geneses were from, and what they are leading us to. If God is not the reason and the answer for our 'doing', we may be in danger of losing our origins or our way back.

True, not many preachers speak convincingly of this enough. Perhaps it is because it necessarily means that the preacher himself is convinced of this, and it is a hard task – both to live and to witness to it. But if done well and celebrated well, the Liturgy of the Church itself speaks volumes about the need to displace ourselves from the centre of the universe. The very fact that we show up and participate despite our wanting to stay in bed; despite mouthing prayers that don’t particularly mean much to us personally that morning; praying for people who we don’t really know; bringing to our attention the “universal” church which is something that I can’t even wrap my mind around, in some ways, “forces” me to think outside of myself and make me a less selfish and self-centered person. I am not at Liturgy for myself. I am there for the ‘other’ that I cannot see, and this experience trains me to meet the great Other that I will one day see.

So, even if it is for a moment, or even an hour a day, it would be more than wise to go into ‘silent mode’, and appreciate God within, to, as Rumi said, go to where you cannot be reached. In that place, it is ultimately God who reaches us.

Are we Christian disciples or would Jesus call us Satan?

2011-08-28T18:02:00.000-04:00

As I was reflecting on yesterday’s gospel passage, it was the fact that Jesus called Simon Peter ‘Satan’ that seemed become a point of prolonged contemplation. Jesus, we know, had a real soft spot for Simon Peter, but at the same time, when it was clear to Jesus that he really missed the point of what Jesus was all about, Jesus did not hesitate to say it as it was, even to the extent of calling him ‘Satan’. It’s not that Peter was satanic by a long shot, but it was precisely that he missed the point of Jesus’ very purpose, which was to usher in the kingdom of God.

Peter had his own take on what the kingdom of God was about. For him, it was something that could not, should not and must not entail suffering of any kind, let alone being killed in the most gruesome and cruel way.

But I think this was not just Peter’s problem alone. In fact, there are a lot of Peter’s in the world. We are Peters whenever we want a plain sailing Christian life, and have a notion that the Christian life is one in which suffering and pain and anything that reminds us of the cross should be vanquished from our lives the moment we become baptized.

When I was in Singapore ministering as a priest, I often encountered many converts to Catholicism from the Taoist or Ancestral Worship background, and often, it was clear to me that though they had gone through the RCIA journey and had received the sacraments of initiation and were sacramentally living the Catholic life, in hidden reality, their view of God was still rather Taoist or steeped in Ancestral Worship categories.

It is most convenient to have God at our beck and call, and to have him answer all of our human needs. Perhaps the background that some had come from gave the idea that God will always answer prayers, especially if one were to ‘jump the hoops’ or do whatever one was instructed to do to appease the gods. When insufficiently catechized, the convert to Catholicism may be totally unaware that they have brought those categories of how god operates, and as it were, simply changed the face of their former deity to now have a Jewish appearance of Jesus, albeit with some Palestinian facial images, as would be expected of someone coming from Jewish stock.

This then becomes problematic when as a convert, God does not seem to answer prayers as ‘powerfully’ as when one was in one’s former religious belief. And I can fully appreciate the confusion and perhaps even disappointment one can experience when in the throes of suffering and pain and seeming hopelessness, one looks at the heavens and with fists clenched in rage, shout out “you are not as powerful as I thought you were, Jesus!” Indeed, in some of the responses to last week’s blog, there were some rather disappointed and pained Catholic converts who came to that conclusion that being Catholic turned out to be a disappointment that they had never anticipated.

In the gospel text of yesterday’s liturgy, Simon Peter clearly didn’t get it. For many of us, the process of catechesis and formation tries to help us to get it, to fully embrace the reality that God’s kingdom is really a process that involves a necessary struggle and a training, as some spiritual masters have put it. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well known for coining the phrase ‘cheap grace’, when he reminds us that the grace of God requires a sort of a suffering on our part. This must be the cross that Jesus is speaking of. But we, unfortunately, want cheap grace.

In almost all areas of our lives, there is suffering and a carrying of some cross in some form. Think of the mother who sacrifices much for her family, or the artist who goes through blocks and blocks of marble to come to that block that finally enables him to carve out the perfect image in his mind; or the athlete who goes through months and months of rigorous training, enduring mind-numbing pain to be able to at the Olympics break a record and have that opportunity to stand at the top podium of the Gold Medalist; or the student who goes through the daily grind of study discipline and diligent work to finally make that breakthrough in understanding tough Theological arguments and concepts in order to make them real and relevant for the laity. These are sufferings, and it would be tempting to want to have them cheap.

I believe that many may want baptism to be the key to the magic door that makes everything smooth and easy, and all things to come our way. But when we think this way, unfortunately, Satan may be our hidden middle name.

Remembering Christ in the Caesarea Philipi’s of our lives

2011-08-21T18:05:00.000-04:00

Invariably, our steadfastness in being true to our declaration that Jesus is the Christ becomes tested and tried not so much in times of plenty and joy, but rather, in times of trial and tribulations. This is a truism that cannot be easily denied. It is always easy to be true to our Christian values and demands when the going is smooth, the bank account is healthy, the larder is full, and our kids are on the straight path in life. After all, these are easy signs that God is indeed blessing us, and our natural response would be to continue walking on our path in Christ’s footsteps.

However, there will come a time when this path seems to veer into the side roads, where undergrowth becomes daunting to clear, and where our faith becomes tested and tried. I believe that these are the times when we have to make that deliberate choice to stay close to our Christian convictions and not ‘sell away’ our Christian identity too easily.

In yesterday’s gospel text, this was graphically put across to us by the seemingly innocent mention of the geographical area of Caesarea Philippi as the place where that conversation between Jesus and Peter took place. Scripture is rich with depth and meaning, and there are no wasted words in the Bible. Although it seems to be something merely mentioned in passing, there is really a deep theological and spiritual significance regarding Caesarea Philippi.Notice that they were not in Jerusalem, the great and beloved city when this conversation took place. Jerusalem was considered to be God’s chosen city. It was the place of high religious office, the place of the temple, and the city of light. But not Caesarea Philippi. This is a place up north called the Golan Heights. And it was also a place which was where the pagan god of Pan was especially honoured. Strange, you’d think, that Jesus would choose a place like this to ask Peter if his allegiance to Christ was going to be steadfast.

I think we all have our Caesarea Philippi moments in life. These are the times when we are somewhat far from where it is easy to be close to God’s temple, where the structures of faith and our familiar pillars of society are constantly reminding us to walk the walk of faith. I guess, in the Jerusalems of our lives, it is easy to declare Jesus as the Christ of our lives. At least, it would be far easier in comparison to when we are at our Caesarea Philippi’s of our lives where God seems to be somewhat distant, or at best, on vacation for whatever reason.
This is when compromise can easily be what we choose, and take the path ‘most’ travelled.I was leafing through the iPad version of the Straits Times from my home Singapore just this morning, and was dismayed to read that there are more and more couples who have headed abroad to places like Thailand, Belgium, Israel, and the United States to choose the gender of their baby through a process called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). In short, this is really playing God in an extreme way, where not only is the embryo dabbled with humanly manipulated, it is also ‘engineered’ to ensure the chosen and preferred gender of the baby will be ‘made’. As if the IVF choice was not intrinsically evil in itself, this adds an even deeper layer of evil which is easily masked by the seeming ‘good’ that can come out of it, because after all, a ‘boy’ child would be for the good of the family line. Obviously, the fact that life is a gift from the true and unique giver of life is overlooked and ignored, making the couple’s choice and intentions far more important God’s.My compassionate side reminds me to try to see things from the couples’ viewpoint. Of course, being Chinese, a son would be wonderful, and I can empathise with couples who are barren and who would love to have children of their own. But barrenness can really be a hallmark of faithfulness if only couples could carry this as a mark of sacrificial or redemptive suffering for so many other reasons, the reparation of souls being a very good one. Sure, it could well be that none of these couples are Catholics and who have been well grounded in good Catholic moral education and formation, and that is why they choose this option of life selection. But this is a very clear example of being in a Caesarea Philippi region of life, where other ‘gods’ are worshipped and one is far from the heart of Jerusalem, the ‘true pole’ of the earth.

I can easily think of other forms of Caesarea Philipis – the temptation to stray from fidelity to one’s spouse; the lure of lucre through illicit means that are so easy and attractive; the walking out from responsibilities of family, society and even nation; or the giving up of life altogether.

What made Peter so remarkable in his response to Jesus was that he declared so pointedly that Jesus was the Christ – meaning the ‘saviour, the anointed one’ in that situation, and in the very next moment, which we will see next weekend, Peter gets it wrong and gets called Satan. Well, that’s us too.

But this is where we need to model ourselves after Peter, because in the end, it was the mercy of Christ that he clung on to that really made him the ‘rock’ that had firm foundations.

Worshipping Mary gives Catholicism a bad name

2011-08-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

It’s inevitable – every time I encounter a Catholic who has moved to another Christian denominational church, or when a Catholic ‘basher’ meets a Catholic in a theological ‘chin-wag’, the topic of Mary and Marian devotion always seems to pop up, and the Catholic is often labeled as a Marian worshipper and someone who dabbles in idolatry. At least that has been the situation in Singapore, and now that I am in America, perhaps that might change – wait and see.

I have come to use a very ‘disarming’ way to dealing with such acrimony when it ensues, and it is to start by agreeing with them. For instance, when the conversation turns to “Catholics have got it all wrong – worshipping Mary when you should be worshipping Christ. It’s not in the bible, and God is not pleased with what you Catholics are doing.” Perhaps you have had chance encounters with such ‘enthusiastic’ proponents of Christianity, and it looked something like this. What I usually do is to start by agreeing with them.

Open up with “Yes, I totally agree with you! It’s terrible how these Catholics have got it all wrong. Mary should never be worshipped, and Mary doesn’t want to be worshipped. In fact, if she is worshipped, not only is God displeased, but so is Mary. You are so correct in pointing this out, and I think we should do our best to educate them.” I am sure you will see the tone change, and the when the storm has calmed down somewhat, that would be the best time to insert what real Catholicism is vis-à-vis Mary, Mariology and devotion to saints.

Lets get this straight from the outset. Devotion to Mary is not absolutely necessary and crucial as a child of God. No one has been sent to hell for not ever praying a Hail Mary or for dissing Mary and her place in Salvation History. True, we are and should all be Christo-centric as Christians. Devotions to saints help us very much because they serve as having encountered the human difficulties and challenges that you and I go through each day of our lives. In a manner of speaking, they have gone through the fire, and their scars and healed wounds have been their letter of reference of their love for God. Our lives here on earth are always made better when we get the help of others who can do things better than we. This applies in the office, in home life, and even in our social lives. What more in the realm of the spiritual life?

But far more than a mere practical standpoint, Jesus literally has ‘given’ Mary to us from his most crucial and pivotal moment of his humanity – on the Cross on Calvary. At a point when he was at his lowest and most abandoned, when every shred of his dignity was stripped from him and he had very little left, even that he chose to ‘give away’, which was Mary being his mother. He told John to behold his Mother. When Jesus gave us himself at the Eucharist at the Last Supper, it was mind boggling. But perhaps it would be audacious of me to suggest that he didn’t quite give his everything at that point yet. He held back two things – his mother, and his own spirit. And he left that to the very last.

It was right at that point of the crux of salvation of all of humanity that Jesus gave everything, and it was at Calvary on the Cross. When we honour what has been bequeathed to us as a legacy by someone at his point of death, we hold that person in a position of highest esteem. Anyone receiving a great gift at a benefactor’s death-bed will always cherish that gift, especially when it is one of enormous value and will make that person very rich and blessed. Jesus did that for us. He gave us his Mother to behold, and after that he gave his life to God the Father.

When we appropriate correctly our worship to Christ as our Saviour and Lord, we will know that it cannot put aside and ignore someone he most cherished and valued in life. We do ourselves a great injustice when we act as if Mary was no feature in the life of Jesus. It doesn’t mean that we should worship her. That is something that needs to be reserved for God and God alone. Catholics who worship Mary have indeed given Catholicism a bad name, and those of us who can, should do our best to re-educate them.

But this is what I have gained from my 10 years of experience as a priest, ministering to many uneducated and elderly Catholics who really have not read any books on spirituality or have found it just too difficult. They may appear to worship Mary, but deep in their hearts, they only mean to worship God. Holding a rosary in their hands is often their way of holding on to the hands of Christ in dire times.

Today, the Church celebrates the Assumption of Mary to heaven, body and soul. It is a universal reminder to all of us that we have a mother given by God himself to love us, to pray for us, and to guide us on our way to Christ who herself is with God in her complete personhood. I’ve always loved the one line in the reading for the Mass of the Assumption from the Book of Revelation that says “the woman herself fled to the desert where she had a place of safety prepared by God”. Indeed, any desert would be that last place one would find safety, but Mary’s faith allowed her to even venture into a desert to discover there a safe haven from dangers. If we find ourselves in the deserts of life, and dare to trust God as much as Mary did, we can always dare to hope that deserts can lead to desserts.

Mary did, and so must we.

Of words and actions

2011-08-07T18:05:00.000-04:00

In my experience as a preacher for the past ten years, I have seen the impact and effect that words can have on people. The general congregation (at least those that I have had the opportunity to preach to each week) are basically a grateful group for having been shown respect by preachers who do their work and preparation before going up to the ambo on any given day at Mass. As I made preparations to leave my parish the past couple of weeks to begin life anew as a student once more, many kind notes and cards were given expressing thanks for the effort to bring some change in their lives through the words I have spoken. And if I have been such an instrument, I do thank the Lord for being such.

But do words really have such power? I guess they have the power to peak one’s interest, to catch the attention, and if the phrasing and choice of words are apt, they can even transport them to another place and time. But why then do most congregants find that even after years and years of hearing homily after homily, sermon after sermon (yes, there is a difference between the two of them) lives are still somewhat unchanged, and hearts generally untouched? I know that there is no scientific evidence available, but I am quite sure that the numbers of lives that really become transformed by mere preaching and having listened to a good homily are inversely proportioned to the numbers that turn up at Masses week after week.

Perhaps this is because the reality is that words can only do so much. What really transforms and what truly invites transformation is when the one speaking becomes a true channel of transformation himself. In other words, the congregation or audience have an unspoken need to see that the very life of the speaker or preacher or in this case, the priest, is living a life as close to the words that tumble out of his mouth as possible.

And this is not just something that we priests must be aware of. Parents who want to guide the hearts of their children must also know that their very lives and actions become the barometer of mummy’s or daddy’s words. What we human beings really search out for are role models in the various areas of our lives, and this is the far more difficult and challenging part of preaching and teaching.

At our level best as teachers of life, we can imitate John the Baptist and point out the way, but as far as real transformation, we make such little progress it can become a tad depressing or even discouraging. There really is far more admiration than transformation and changed living in the religious and priestly arenas and this is something that saddens.

When the disciples of Jesus went to him and complained that there were some demons that were stubborn and resisted exorcism, Jesus replied that ‘this kind can only be cast out by prayer and fasting’. Herein lies the true power of effective devil-battling and spiritual warfare which many of us don’t take seriously enough.

What Jesus alluded to is the need for true integration in our lives on all areas if we want our words to really be effective. There is a lot of disintegration in the world today, both in the secular as well as in the religious and spiritual platforms. Bankers are distrusted, politicians are paid scant respect when their skeletons are dragged out of the closet, and priests and religious drag the good name of God down many notches when scandals of various proportions hit the pages of newspapers.

How is it that great saints have had the real power to effect positive changes in people even though some of them were cloistered away, sequestered perhaps, in convents and monasteries? It must be the belief in the universal power of an upright and moral heart that transcends physical barriers and nation boundaries and knows no borders. I must believe that my yen for holiness even though half a world away has its effects on lives and hearts that are beyond my physical reach.

This conviction must sustain my wanting to continue to practice with love and conviction the daily disciplines of prayer and regular abstinence for a universal effect of transformed hearts and lives, and inspire others to do the same.

Only then can words really make a real difference.

Cutting off arms and tearing out eyes

2011-07-31T18:03:00.000-04:00

One of the most challenging things that a priest can do in his ministry is to help the enchained to be free and the lame to walk. No, I am not talking about any sort of radical liberation theology nor of any sort of miraculous healing. I am referring to the transformation that can happen when the grace of the sacrament of reconciliation invites and compels a penitent to want to walk that path of holiness after having strayed and made the wrong choices.

Why is this challenging? Simply because if the penitent is sincere about making those life changing decisions, it will be a very painful thing to do, especially so if the sin had been one that had been deeply engrained in the life of the penitent hitherto the confession. We are not talking about small change here (pun intended). What really rocks the boats of our lives is when one squarely looks into one’s life, and sees that for a long time, one has been making the wrong choices, getting one into the present fix that one is in, and the only way out is to make those radical decisions that require some root pulling.

To be sure, many of these changes are not going to come easy, especially if another person is involved, or when some attachment had already been long established. For instance, making that cut from an affair in an adulterous relationship is going to be heartbreaking for sure. I have even advised the owner of shares in a casino related business to sell off those shares as being a shareholder in such a business is tantamount to being a contributing partner in an enterprise that ruins the lives of many. Apparently, he sold his shares but nevertheless feels a certain regret each time he sees how much the share price has risen since then.

In scripture, Jesus gives us a very graphic image of what I had just elucidated. Mt 18:8-9 has him say, “If your hand or foot should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away”. And a little further, “if your eye should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be thrown into the hell of fire.”

What gives? Does Jesus want us all limping around like victim of minefield mishaps or looking like Cyclops? Certainly not. But what he alludes to is the reality that if we are serious about sin and its effects to our lives (entering into life), there are choices that we have to make, and oftentimes, these choices will hurt.
How does one deal with the pain? Perhaps this is where good spiritual direction comes in. Few spiritual journeyers make full use of spiritual directors to help one to truly enter into life, especially if one has been maimed due to radical cutting and plucking, and this is most unfortunate.

One of the best ways to work around the pain is to realize that all of us need to have a real loving and living relationship with Jesus, who is saviour and Lord. The word “Saviour” has connections with the word “salve” or healing balm, and also has links with the world ‘salvation’. If we cut off our reliance on the opiate of sin that had us sin-bound for many years of our lives, we would be in free-fall mode if there is no where or no one who we can “hold on to” once we have made that radical cut. Why Jesus is called our Saviour is because he has always been, and will always the one who we have to be rooted in to dare to stand apart from our attachment to sin.
It has been my sad observation that many a Catholic has yet to really form that deep abiding relationship with Jesus from the get go. And so, when the wave of life comes our way, we tend to get swept up in all that thrills and delights us, taking us to wherever we think is appropriate. Storm-tossed in the sea of life, if one has lost one’s sight of the saving beacon of Christ on the shore of life, one easily thinks that one can float fancy free in the open waters, until one realizes that one’s compass (moral or otherwise) has been spinning amok.

Does this then mean that establishing a relationship with Christ becomes just another opiate to occupy our minds in place of some other person or thing? It certainly could. But that should only be a start. Even saints had to purify their relationship with Christ, and most did not get it correct from the start.

I sincerely believe that when we truly establish Christ as the head of our lives, when he becomes the centre of our universe (which he truly is), it orientates our lives in the proper way that it should be. Our marriages become ‘set’ right when we love Christ first before our spouses. Our families become ‘set’ right when we truly make Christ the head of each household and orientate our lives towards his and his kingdom. It will also make our work, our recreation, our goals and every other aspect of our lives ‘fall into place’.

If Christ is not yet the centre of our lives, and if we only want to cut our relationship with the ‘arms’ or ‘eyes’ that have caused us to go astray in life, it will be akin to abandoning our pleasure yachts on the high seas of life, jumping into the shark infested waters with only a life raft or some floatation device, and trying to swim shore-ward without a guiding beacon.

But with Christ deeply rooted at the true centre of our lives, we can courageously make that necessary, albeit painful decision to cut off arms and tear out eyes.

Stretching our hearts for greater love

2011-07-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

I recently came across this very touching story during our recent priests’ retreat, showing the immense faith that some people have in God.

In his ministry in India, our retreat master had the opportunity to meet a married couple, both of which were active in ministry. They were learned university professors, and had three children. Apparently, their youngest son was born with a rib cage that somehow stopped growing, meaning that as he grew, his chest would be constricted more and more, and the prognosis was that he would die by the age of 18. This sadly did happen. They also had a daughter who had earned two doctorate degrees by the time she was in her mid twenties. But it was also at this time that she tragically met with a road accident that claimed her life.

What made me sit up and listen to the story of this couple was not so much their double tragedies in life, which I am sure were heartbreaking in themselves, but the fact that our retreat master said that never once did he hear them ask God “why”? He said that they were a deeply faithful couple that loved God and submitted humbly to a plan that was not theirs to determine or to direct. This couple were not simpletons nor ignorant about matters of the faith either. Highly learned, they were also highly spiritual. In fact, they are now running a free college for poor students who cannot afford an education, equipping them with degrees for life.

How is it that some people can encounter such tragedies and not be angry with God and walk away from their faith? I personally know of many who have had lesser pains in life, and took the very first exit out of the church in anger and resentment. I am sure that there are many who are reading this post who personally know of people who have either blamed God for afflictions in their lives, or are punishing God in some unspoken way.

The largess of one’s heart is not something that one is automatically born with. Most of the time, it takes a careful nurturing spirit and a willingness to be formed. What most of us struggle with is that the real lessons that magnify the chambers of our hearts to love God for who he is, are lessons that come very often through tears, sorrow and pain. Whoever wrote the words of the Salve Regina prayer during the Middle Ages must have known this to be true, when he spoke about the ‘lacrimarum vale’, or the valley of tears. Many a faithful pilgrim in life have walked this valley, and this couple seems to have made repeat visits there.

Does God delight in ‘testing’ our faith? A very interesting question but also a very commonly asked one. Does it mean that when people are already walking very closely with God in life that they should be spared from suffering and trials? That certainly cannot be true. Even holy people suffer much. Think of Padre Pio and Therese of Lisieux. These are just two examples of holy people who suffered much. Just last week, I found out with sadness that my spiritual ‘mentor’ Fr Ronald Rolheiser is being treated for colon cancer.

Maybe it is a false question to ask if God takes delight in testing our faith. A more relevant question to ask ourselves is what limits are we willing to take our faith to when our hearts are asked to stretch to accommodate God’s love that often takes on so many different forms that we are not prepared for. After all, that is the main task of our spiritual life – to keep enlarging our hearts and stretching ourselves we are made in God’s image and likeness. Most of our lives bear terrible scars because when our tragedies struck, our hearts of love were stiff and not supple. A great hallmark of a true athlete is one who doesn’t easily get injured because his muscles, ligaments and tendons have been repeatedly stretched and can take the stresses that pushing one’s limits causes.

One of our common tasks in life is to become spiritually lithe, to allow our very selves to take on not just our load, but to share the loads of others along life’s journey. ‘No pain; no gain’ is a phrase many trainers like to use to encourage their charges. Perhaps this is true for our spiritual lives as well.

Reaching out to hands that can’t reach back

2011-07-17T18:00:00.000-04:00

Our human tendency seems to gravitate towards being rewarded and recognized, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t need trained psychologists to tell us that when we receive a positive stroke for good work done, when our sedulousness has been recognized, or when we receive a note of thanks, our self-esteem is given a shot in the arm, enabling us to be more positive in our outlook and increase our productivity.

But the ‘high’ that this brings can sometimes become a very hidden narcotic that is not easily recognized and we are loath to admit it. So, while the public, outward and expressed self does magnanimous, generous and generally noteworthy acts of kindness and mercy, the hidden, inward and unexpressed self waits in the shadows of the inner corridors of our hearts, anticipating the next ‘fix’ of the ego boost. If we are truly honest with ourselves, the best of us has seen that side of our personality, and it is not something we are proud of. In fact, the more we personally admit to it, the more real it becomes. If others ‘uncover’ it, our defense mechanism automatically kicks into high gear and often, our first words of retaliation would be ‘are you sure’?

St Paul’s haunting phrase in Rom 7:15 comes to mind when he says so honestly “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” All us, if we are deathly honest with ourselves will resonate with the apostle in his human struggle. It seems to be ingrained in our shared broken humanity.

One of the more effective ways to address this is to practice acts of mercy, and to do that often. Visit the sick, give alms to the poor, attend to those who are worse off than yourself, stoop to speak to the little ones. I can almost hear my detractors saying “but can’t we end up doing these for the sake of being thanked, seen as humble and in that way, being worse off than when we first started?” Of course that is possible but it doesn’t mean that we should not try.

When we do this often enough, when it is part of our schedule, when it is not a once-a-year affair, but purposefully done, it can weaken the hidden self that lurks in those chambers of our hearts. To be sure, that self will never be completely removed. At least not while we are alive. But that self can be given less food to grow, and his condition can be stifled and his development stunted.

I find this true in my own life. I have an aunt who has been slipping into dementia for the past couple of years, and is now in nursing care in a home for the aged. I have made it a point to visit her every week on my day off and she cannot remember my name even though she may try. I have lost count of the times she calls me Dominic, which gives credit to the real Dominic, a very genial and caring man who works full time in the said home. Dominic has a heart of gold. Sometimes, when I share with others that my aunt never remembers my name when I visit her, their reaction has sometimes been “and you do this so often?”

When a person slips into dementia, and when we visit them regularly, it is not for them to remember us, but for us to show that they are remembered. Whether aunt Michelle calls me Dominic, Terence or even Shirley matters not as much as my calling her “Ee Mah” (that, for my non Cantonese-speaking readers, means eldest maternal aunt). The same goes for people who visit patients who have had severe strokes and are in a comatose state who have no response at all. Doing these regularly with a dedication makes us weaken that part of us that hopes for some ‘recognition’ or ‘thank you’ simply because they cannot. It is times like these that show that hands reaching out to others are far more important than the hands that are unable to respond and reach back. These acts of mercy really can help us to nurture that part of us that recognizes God’s mercy when we it comes to us at the most unexpected and unrecognizable times.

As most of my readers know, I am being sent to Washington DC for further studies for two years, and I leave shortly. Friends and parishioners have asked me what I will miss most. Some think it is food, some think the warm weather, others my links to a parish community. Actually it is none of them.

But among the things that I will definitely miss are my weekly visits to my aunt as well as to one other comatose patient in another home. In fact, they probably don’t realize that what they do for me is more than anything I could have done for them, because each time my visits end, I gain more strength and determination to slay that hidden, lurking self.

Making God a priority with our magna anima

2011-07-10T18:04:00.000-04:00

In this life, no one is free from tension. In fact, just on the level of physics, tension creates energy. It affects and has a bearing on force, causing the effect of momentum, which affects movement. So too in life. Our very being experiences tension on very many levels, and these often remind us that we are alive and not dead. Advocates of a stress-free lifestyle recommend that we should have as little tension as possible if we want to live in a happy state. But tension is not always a bad thing. In fact, healthy tension, when balanced well, gives us a sense of being in touch with reality and with life.

The spiritual fathers of the Church have noted this in their writings. Inside each one of us lie the magna anima (great soul) and the pusilla anima (the little soul). What is the magna anima but that part of us which endears and envisions the doing of good, great and godly things in life. Just read any of the biographies of the saints, and you will easily see the magna anima on grand display. It’s the part of St Francis of Assisi which spoke of the possibility of living perfect joy; it’s the stalwart courage of Maximilian Kolbe which gave him the strength to give up his life so that another prisoner could have life instead of him; it’s the amazing prophetic action of Bishop Oscar Romero who dared to speak for justice and human rights, and ended up giving up his life rather dramatically. In short, it’s that part of us that dares to live big, and do big things for God and for our fellow man.

The pusilla anima or little soul is just the opposite. That’s the part of us which hides away from living the Christian life; from being prophetic in our life, and instead, wants to either save the self, or hide in the shadows of anonymity. The times when this part of us shows itself are many –when we prefer not stand up for the underdog; when we give in to temptation and the lure to satisfy the self at the expense of others; and when our own plans, conveniences and comforts become more important than the other person’s. In short, it’s when we are selfish and self-centered.

No one, short of those born without original sin, has not given in to these temptations. Is this tension a bad thing? Not necessarily. It is the presence of this tension in us, and the awareness that there are these poles that exist in us that can make us want to strive for holiness. Of course, the opposite is true, where many give in to despair and think that fighting this is of no use at all, because this tension will always be there without dissipating.
What causes one to live large and not in a small way? Apart from God’s grace without which nothing is possible, it is that part of us that yearns to make God a priority in life.

To be sure, there are many things that pull us away from making God a priority in our lives. I have heard confessions galore that tell me that there are many who place job, leisure, pleasure, money, rest, family and education way above God when it comes to Sunday worship. If that happens on a Sunday where coming to Mass for one hour is an obligation, what more when placing God in the top spot in life is not “obligatory” on the other days of the week? Or when no one is looking?

But this is understandable. Putting God anywhere near one’s list of priorities in life will always seem challenging, counter intuitive and somehow impractical. After all, Jesus never said that living the Beatitudes was going to be a walk in the park. God, it seems, doesn’t make it particularly easy for us to want to love him – at least this is what many tell me when they are at their most honest.

But loving God has to be a commitment, like loving our spouses. I am sure that most of the time, one does not feel like loving one’s spouse. One is not in a mood for romance most of the time. One is not in a particularly forgiving spirit most of the time, and one is usually not in a gentle and communicative mood most of the time. But when these are done out of a decision and not as a response to a feeling, they raise the value of one’s actions, because they become a commitment that is palpable and tangible.

Loving God because he has been showing particular grand evidence of providence and grace in our lives is not big deal. Like when we do well in our careers, or when we seem blessed with financial or social success. But choosing to love God despite the fact that our lives are difficult, despite not ‘feeling’ his presence, despite not getting ‘what we ask for’, becomes for many of us lived out examples of living in the magna anima.

That is what the heroes of our faith did, and that is what we need to do in lives as well.

Blessings and being blessings

2011-07-03T18:03:00.002-04:00

Within each of us, there is an innate awareness that to be blessed is a good thing. For example, one doesn’t need to be a Christian to know that it is good for couples to receive the ‘blessings’ of their parents before getting married. In fact, in our Catholic culture, we have blessings for so many things that we have formal written prayers suited for just about every occasion that needs a blessing. One of my earliest recollections of experiencing a blessing was when my parents bought me my very first rosary in a church store and thereafter, asked me to go up to the priest to get it blessed. It was a special moment, as if with a special wave of his hand and some mutterings, the simple plastic glow-in-the-dark rosary became something precious, more valued and gave me a ‘connect’ with God.

But it has also been my experience as a priest that there are many Catholics who are not quite bothered about the ‘why’ of blessings. And because many do not attempt to ask the necessary questions, they can often end up with a rather pagan mentality when it comes to blessings, both of things, and of people.

I have yet to find the appropriate time or setting to address the prevalent practice of the faithful coming up to the priest (or Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion) distributing Holy Communion during Mass, and asking for a blessing. I am not quite sure where this ‘practice’ started, but I can appreciate that it probably stems from the interior desire to receive something good from God. This is always done by people who are not able to receive Holy Communion for various reasons. Some have yet to make their First Holy Communion, some are catechumens, some are in irregular marriages, and some are not even baptized.

I have no qualms about giving blessings. I have no reason to. But as in most things in life, there are appropriate places and times for this to be done. After all, the time for Holy Communion is precisely meant for that – to receive Holy Communion. It is within the part of the Liturgy called "Communion Rite", and not "Blessing Rite". In our Liturgy, each moment has a specific, significant purpose. There are parts where we seek reconciliation, there are parts where we pray for our needs and those of the world, there are parts where we pray in silence, there are parts to listen to prayers, and there are parts to receive blessings. It is understood to be bad liturgical form to have an action with two intentions.

My 'issue' is with the non-communicants who join the line for a blessing together with communicants who are in the line for the reception of Holy Communion. With these two 'options' seemingly open to the people, it appears to be something like a spiritual smorgasbord or buffet, where if one cannot receive Holy Communion, one can choose to go for option two, which is to receive a blessing. And this has never been in the intention of the liturgy.

Perhaps what is an even deeper ‘problem’ is what this practice tends to breed – a mentality of getting not what the Church wants to give, but instead, making the Church give us what we want, when we want, and how we want. Again, the insidious mentality of "I, Me and Mine" or "my-rights-are-not-being-met".

Isn't the blessing at the end of Mass valid and efficacious? The blessing given at that point of the Mass is THE time for the congregation to be blessed as a whole. In fact, everything in the Mass is for the body of Christ as a whole, rather than for individuals. The Church has always been quick to address any ‘private’ devotions and overly individualistic pious practices during public liturgical celebrations. That is why we should refrain as far as possible from praying the rosary while the Mass is going on, and why individual ‘private’ baptisms are discouraged. We are there as a body of believers, fed and nourished and blessed as a body of believers and sent on mission as a body of believers. Coming up to receive a personal blessing at a time when everyone else is receiving Holy Communion tends to reduce a public act to a ‘private time’.

Is this a small issue? Not to the individual concerned, I am sure. Each individual will always ‘fight’ for his or her case to be addressed and served, but Liturgy is not a private matter. The very definition and etymology of Liturgy is a “public act of service”. Not realizing this will get us into all sorts of ‘personal’ demands that really have very little ground.

Maybe there is another issue at hand which is even more pressing, and has greater repercussions for the community, and it is this - we may be becoming a people who are far more interested to receive blessings than to become blessings to a world that needs to be blessed by our very lives.

The Eucharist – a demonstration of love in more ways than one

2011-06-26T18:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, the Church celebrated the Solemnity of Corpus Christi in different ways. In countries where it is allowed (it is still not something that our governing authorities are keen to give us license to do here in my country) outdoor and public processions were held where the Consecrated Host was paraded in liturgical processions through the streets as a testimony to our Catholic belief in the Real Presence of the Lord in the sacred host. Some parishes organized Holy Hours in their premises for the same purpose. What we all shared in common was a celebration of faith in something that is simply too simplistic for the mind that constantly wants proof and empirical evidence for a belief, and too awesome for one who has faith - that the bread housed in the Monstrance is really and truly the Body of Christ the Lord.

Perhaps it was because we as Church were observing this solemnity since the 13th century in grand and elaborate ways around this time of the year, that I recently received in my email a video on YouTube that featured a Capuchin monk in downtown Preston, UK, lifting a Monstrance containing the Sacred Host and inviting passers by to kneel and worship in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Apparently this took place only a couple of weeks ago, if the date at the beginning of the video is accurate. It was dated 2 June 2011.

For close to eight minutes, this monk, wearing a brown habit and donning a Stole, held aloft the Monstrance, whilst in the background, a fellow monk was reading from Sacred Scripture passages which made references to Jesus from the Old and New Testament. As in most flash mob videos, perceptably, more and more people gathered, not to dance, but to kneel around the raised Host in adoration. And as in most flash mob videos, the idea was to give the impression that this was totally uncoordinated and impromptu and unrehearsed event, with the hope that others who really were not part of the event would join in and kneel in adoration too. At the end of the 8 minutes or so, the priest promptly placed the monstrance back into his gym bag that he carried Jesus in, removed his stole, and disappeared into the crowd.

I must say that watching this video brought many thoughts to my priestly mind. There were, to be sure, two sides of me saying things to my two selves. One was saying “isn’t this a wonderful testimony to the real presence to a world which doesn’t want much to have much to do with God these days!” The same voice was saying “isn’t it sad that there were so many other pedestrians who just couldn’t be bothered one bit about God who was there in their midst in downtown Preston?”

But I must admit that the other voice won out in the end. This ‘voice’ found distasteful the stunt that the monks pulled in order to demonstrate our Catholic faith. Jesus out of a gym bag? It seemed more like a Felix-the-Cat moment gone terribly wrong. Yes, it was done in the light of the feast of Corpus Christi, where the Real Presence was brought out in a grand procession to demonstrate our faith, and at certain street corners, the entire procession would stop so that the faithful could adore in public. But this was not a procession and it certainly was not liturgical at all, save for a stole which the priest hung around his neck just before taking Jesus out of his gym bag.

But my gripe is not so much liturgical, but rather form and purpose. When Jesus gave himself to us in the form of bread and wine, they were meant for us to eat and nourish ourselves first, before adoring. Nowhere in the Scripture can you find Jesus telling his disciples to worship him. Not even when he was alive. He said “follow me” many times, but never directly “worship me”. This however, does not mean we should not be worshipping him. We need to. In fact, we will worship once we come to the realization of who Jesus is. He allowed us to develop in our appreciation of his presence to us. The law of gradualness applies.

One of the great problems that our church faces is that there are many who do worship Jesus, but only in the Eucharistic bread. Many hesitate to ‘worship’ him in neighbour, in service of the less advantaged, in carrying out acts of justice, and in forgiving the enemy. These are all very necessary and legitimate forms of ‘eucharistic worship’ too, which unfortunately, become forgotten when we over emphasise his presence only in the Eucharistic bread. Perhaps the fault lies in priests not emboldened enough to want to speak about these forms of Eucharistic worship and acts for fear of stirring the still but murky waters of our undisturbed consciences.

I pray that the curious on-lookers who saw such a spectacle that day in downtown Preston went further to ask the participants more about what that was all about. Apparently, leaflets about our faith were also handed out during the 8 minute drama. What we need is a good balance of both – proper (liturgical and otherwise) worship of Christ in the Eucharist, and proper efforts to live out his presence after worship.

These stunts may just end up stunting our lives as living members of the Body of Christ.

My Sacerdotal Anniversary – 10 years makes a good start

2011-06-19T18:05:00.001-04:00

If this weekly blog of mine does continue with any consistent regularity into the future, every year, around 20 June, I plan to pen some reflections on the priesthood, in particular my priesthood, as it marks my sacerdotal anniversary. This year, I celebrate a mini milestone – it’s my tenth year as an ordained Roman Catholic priest.

Has it been happy? That’s a tough question. After all, happiness is relative. But someone said about money - that money is relative – the more money, the more relatives. That’s my feeble attempt at wry humour, in case you missed it.

But on a more serious note, we can generally agree that happiness is indeed relative. Happiness is fleeting, and it is also dependent upon so many different factors in different people that it becomes problematic when we gauge anything by the value of happiness. Most apparent of all is the fact that happiness is a feeling. You can’t measure feelings. And if there’s one thing about feelings that we simply must understand is that love is not and cannot be about feelings. The moment we allow our feelings to direct when we love, how we love, and whom we love, we easily become self-centered and selfish people.

I shall borrow once more from the erudite Fr Ronald Rolheiser who said recently that what matters most in life is not happiness but meaning. If our lives have been meaningful, if they have contributed to the meaning of the lives of others, if they have added meaning to the world and to the hard tasks in life like suffering, discomfort and misadventure, then our lives would have mattered much more than if they simply made us happy. Happiness is something that can be bought. You can, for a price of an admission ticket, go to some theme park and experience the ‘happiest place on earth’, but the ‘most meaningful place on earth’ has yet to be used as a marketing ploy because that would be literally choosing the narrow gate that to many remains the least preferred choice.

In my years as a priest, notably a ‘young’ priest as compared to my confreres who are wizened way beyond my years, a question that is often asked is why did I become a priest. I have always viewed that as somewhat of a trick question because it means that it has a one-off answer, and that it is in the past. I have noticed that any answer that I give indicates the struggles that I have been going through at those particular times that the question was posed. Bringing these to my spiritual director for reflection and direction, I realize that the motives for becoming a priest have a somewhat evolving texture, much like the ways that identifying the motives for becoming a seminarian had a similar evolving weave.

So for the present, I shall settle with ‘meaning’. Being a priest has not only added meaning to my life, but I do hope that it has also brought meaning to the lives of the many whom I have encountered, touched and hopefully, healed and motivated in these last ten years of active ministry. Happiness just doesn’t cut it, because not even Jesus was happy all the time in his ministry. I’m willing to wager that hanging on the cross hoisted above Calvary on that first Good Friday could not have been a very happy moment in Jesus’ life. In fact, his use of the Greek ‘makarios’ in Matthew’s Beatitudes has been translated into “happy are the …” has us standing on our heads to see how Jesus defines happiness.

No, it has not been happy all the time for me either as a priest these ten years past, but having said that I don’t think that any one of my friends, parishioners, former classmates and schoolmates can ever say that their choice of vocation in life has been one that has been happy at every single moment of their lives. If so, then the tapestry of their lives would be more like a flat sheet made up of one single shade.

But if our lives are indeed a picturesque tapestry on which not just we, but God the master weaver as well adjusts the warps and wefts of the loom of life, then the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows, successes and failures, the times of sickness and health, plenty and poverty, all add to the depth of meaning and beauty beyond adequate description.

Some of my brother priests are Golden Jubilarians this year, and have celebrated 50 years of their priesthood. In the shadow of their milestone, my ten years looks more like a kidney stone. I salute their commitment and courage, and their quest for holiness. But perhaps 10 years is a good beginning to look at things anew, and where possible, add more meaning to a world that is constantly searching for it, albeit in often the wrong places.

Choosing not to play the blame game

2011-06-12T18:02:00.000-04:00

One of the most common games that we play as members of the human race is the blame game. There are no formal rules in this game. We learn to play this largely by osmosis. We see our elders and leaders in the community in which we live playing it so deftly and in large and small ways and we pick it up almost through instinct. And we ourselves start playing it from our very early years. We see its incipient traces when young children start using the phrase "it was not me", especially when some transgression was discovered and it became apparent that one and something to do about the situation.

We see this happening in our first parents in the unfolding of the Genesis creation story in the bible as well. When God asked Adam about having taken from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Eden, he started playing the blame game and finger-pointed Eve as well as God, when he said "it was the woman you put with me". In one deft move, Adam tried to exonerate himself. I guess one could call it crude self-preservation, but it doesn't take much to see that this was what was happening. And from that point, up and down the centuries, we haven't veered much from this 'original shame' that is the seedbed of our original sinfulness.

What could possibly 'save' us from this? Only if there be a human being who refuses to play this insidious game right from the start - to show that it is not only possible but downright necessary because this would be living life the way that it was intended to be by the one who gave us life. This Saviour must be the one who, when he sees that it is so easy to play this game and save himself, flatly refuses to be sucked into the life-sapping process that the downward spiral of sin takes us all into. And only God himself could do this.

But does God then change everyone's inherent desire to play this game? Yes and no. The instinct to play this game is still inherent in each one of us, but Jesus gives us the ability to fight against this self-saving and self-preserving spirit that you and I possess. And when we share this with others, we encourage them not to play the game too. When we divest and to share rather than hoard and possess, we don't play the game. When we own up to our weakness and refuse to blame others as a way to escape any finger pointing, we purposely lose at the blame game. And it becomes most apparent that we withdraw big time from the game when we boldly imitate Jesus on the cross and utter with deep sincerity "forgive them Father, for they know not what they do."

In just two separate instances this week, this game played in two different settings. One global, the other national. Spain is understandably upset that Germany had blamed them for the recent terrible E Coli outbreak that claimed the lives of 30 people in Germany, and leaving many others very ill. Their agriculture industry suffered a huge blow because of the blame, which has since proven to be untrue as the source of this deadly bacteria. On the home front, several areas in Singapore had been hit by floods and the water ministry and water agencies immediately said that they were working on the premise that the weather pattern has changed, rather than say that perhaps their ministries needed to rework the way they managed the drainage systems all these years.

If only we can begin by looking at ourselves first, as countries, as a ministry, and individually as human beings, perhaps we can do our bit to stop this spiral and step out of the game, and boldly refuse to take part in what often ends up not just being a blame game, but blood sport too.

Why we need Mary in our lives and not just at our death

2011-06-05T18:02:00.000-04:00

Of all the lines in the Hail Mary prayer that are beautiful and relevant to our lives, I consider the last one to be not only most significant but also highly necessary as we are people who are ‘in the vale of tears’, journeying from life here to the next. We say, “pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.”

If we take this in the most literal sense, then we are asking Mary to intercede and pray for us at the last sixty minutes of our earthly existence before the ECG machine shows a flatline. Yes, this is good and even necessary, but that would be leaving things quite literally to the eleventh hour. We Catholics are not last minute people, and are known to take pride in the lost art of delayed gratification and remote preparation; so certainly, this must apply to things as exigent as death. What are we really praying for then?

The Catholic believes that at many many moments, dotted throughout each day, we face a choice of sometimes more than two options before us. This can be in things as simple and mundane like what to eat, and what to wear, to life altering options like what jobs to take or which life-partner we should be considering. At each of these junctures there is a need to discern. It would vex the mind to no end if we think that we need to do serious discernment at the food court to make the ‘proper’ choice between a bowl of noodles or a slice of pizza. Some things are best left to simple preference or the dictates of our growling stomachs.

But there will be moments when the choice bears far more consequences for our soul. For instance, when being faced with either speaking the truth resulting in being personally inconvenienced or fudging the facts so that our lives are not shifted out of our zones of comfort. Or when it becomes very obvious that living as disciples of Christ becomes the much harder thing to do especially when displaying such life options results in our being discriminated against. Speaking up for the truth and justice, especially when doing that can result in our being sidelined and bypassed for a promotion is a very hard choice to make. Making the choice for the harder and more selfless option results in a dying to the self.

It is this dying that we are asked to attune ourselves to as true disciples of the Lord. Our weak human selves will do all we can to want to justify the choice that serves the self more than it serves the overall good of humankind. And it will feel like a dying when we know that the choice we make doesn’t give us much room for earthly happiness. This is the ‘hour’ of death for which we need Mary’s prayers the most.

The problem becomes compounded when we do not even consider that these moments are moments of any form of ‘dying’. When we resist these little deaths each day, we become ill prepared for that great death that we will all have to face when our time here is up.

One of my spiritual gurus in my training once told us “only when have trained well for our daily little deaths will we be ready to face the great death.” But we are indeed blessed to not have to die these small deaths alone. We have the assured prayers of our Blessed Mother to aid us to die a little, at each of these hours of death, so that if we die before we die, we will not die when we die.

Looking at the Ascension from a new vista

2011-05-29T18:01:00.001-04:00

This Thursday, Catholics all over the world (except in those Dioceses where the Solemnity is moved to the following Sunday) will observe and celebrate the Ascension of the Lord. It is a day of obligation where we will gather once again on a weekday to be at Mass and to have a divine meal at the Lord’s Table with all and sundry. What does this Solemnity really celebrate? What is the Church trying to help her people to enter into with this observance? Do we find this something as meaningful?

On the most superficial level, it would be commemorating the day when Jesus left this earth in his post-resurrection form. When I was in the Holy Land on pilgrimage a couple of years back, we visited the supposed spot where Jesus literally ‘lifted off’ the ground on that day in history. The convoluted history of the Holy Land caused the site to be built and destroyed, built again and destroyed again by Christians and Muslims, till now, it is a holy site (to both the Muslims and the Christians) and the exact spot (supposed) of the ascension is now housed within an unused Mosque which welcomes Christian pilgrims who enter into the tiny octagonal structure for a nominal fee.

Our tour guide told us that the imprint on the stone is said to be that of Jesus’ right foot. Pilgrims can be seen removing their footwear to stand on that spot, and I suppose, image what it must have been like for Jesus.

Ascension Thursday cannot be just about the geographical spot, or about how Jesus left this world. It would be too facile to just celebrate it at that level, because we as Church are invited to reflect on what Jesus’ leaving us does for us who are his disciples, and to see how we can catch glimpses of the Ascension in our own lives and appreciate the wisdom and necessity of Jesus’ departure.

What the Ascension tries to help us to do is to identify with the times in our lives when our presence in the lives of others becomes more profound and to a certain extent, purified, when we are no longer hemmed in by our physicality. People who have lost very close loved ones will know what I am referring to. Their going away, through time, results in their being present to us in ways far more often and more intimate that when they were alive and physically present. This must have been what Jesus meant that his going away was something that would result in a joy for his disciples, because he was going to send them his spirit.

Those of us who have been away from home for a long period of time, be it for studies or work, will know that the fondness of family love and friendly bonding become far more intense in those times than when we were in close proximity. That old familiar saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder is never more true.

This applies very accurately to love, life and intimacy. What we want to control, what we want to be monitoring closely and giving very little freedom to often becomes stifled and smothered, hampered in growth and the ability to extend. We don’t have to look very far for examples. When our mentors and superiors are over controlling and don’t give us the scope to make mistakes and to learn from them, it can result in a negative growth.

So too for the spiritual life. Jesus can only send us his spirit if he leaves us. We would be far too dependent on his physical presence if he never did ascend, and with out his Holy Spirit, we would not be able to ‘perform even greater works’ than Jesus himself did. In fact, the Ascension really celebrates his great trust in us as his disciples, to carry on the legacy that he has left behind to continue to build his father’s kingdom.

Anyone who has lost a loved one will know the tears and heart-wrenching pain that separation causes. But there is a grace that also comes, albeit with the passing of time – a grace that, because of the mystery of love, our loved ones are more present to us than before.

Looking at the Ascension through this lens helps us to celebrate this solemnity with a deeper sense of joy and appreciation.

Not all things legal are ethical

2011-05-22T18:05:00.000-04:00

It is extremely easy and tempting for anyone (yes, even Catholics) to simply live life according to the laws laid down by the State. After all, the powers that be that govern any land are supposed to be the voice of justice and they have done the hard task of thinking of the repercussions of every law that is decreed. That leaves all the masses to just follow as told, and we should all be in a very happy state. Ah, if only it were so easy and clear. Ever since I have been a priest and have been hearing confessions, I realize that the general conscience of the penitents are formed (or deformed) more by what is legal than by what the Church declares to be moral and right.

“But Father, not every one is Catholic!” is something I can anticipate coming out from just about every reader’s lips. Granted, but herein lies the problem. The very word “Catholic” means far more than just a religion. It means Universal, and taken in the broadest sense of the word, how we form our conscience, how we make our decisions, have a common framework that covers all humanity and all life, regardless of race or religion. For instance, our high regard and utmost respect for life stays constant, and should not be different simply because one looks at life from a different religious lens.

I was in a conversation recently with an employer of a stay-in domestic helper and I casually asked about the maid and her weekly day off. I was told “she only gets one day off a month”, and when I asked why this was so, the answer that I got was “it’s in her contract, and within the Ministry of Manpower guidelines”.

This person is one of the many whose conscience seems to be confined and limited to what the state defines as legal and permissible, rather than what is ethical and just. Clearly, it didn’t disturb her one bit to give her maid one day a month of freedom and rest from work, when in her own working life, she would be loathe to be given anything less than a weekend off every week. ‘Protected’ behind what the state says is legal and equating this with being ethical is something that, sadly, has become commonplace even among us Catholics who are supposed to have sound consciences.

Yes, I agree that the pace in hectic Singapore is frenetic. Very often, both husband and wife are working to make ends meet, and looking after children and the elderly parents within the same household are difficult without help. This is where maids become almost de rigueur in every family. And I can understand that when the weekend comes, wanting the maid to do everything ‘because she is there’ becomes extremely tempting as an option. But there has to be an alternative because the maid is another human person with just as much dignity as you and I have, needing and appreciating just as much rest and recuperation for sound mind and body as you and I have, and yes, wanting social interaction as you and I would want. That maids are social human beings who really do have a need to mix around and have friends (yes, that includes boyfriends if they are not married back home) seems to be something that many employers simply cannot accept as humane and normal.

Perhaps we have not considered the possibility of taking turns to look after the sick and elderly during the weekends, where the different members of the family can sacrifice one weekend in rotation each so that everyone has a chance to care for the parent, giving the maid the needed rest, enabling her to do a much better and kinder job from Monday to Saturday.

This is just one very vivid example of taking advantage of something that is legal, and using it without wondering if it is ethical and just.

I am sure that this blog would disturb many who do employ maids and are giving them the ‘bare minimal’ in terms of benefits and living conditions. The role of the shepherd is to take care of the sheep under his care, and one of these ways is to heighten the conscience of the sheep.

This shepherd here is trying to get his sheep to think with both the mind and the heart.

Preparing for death by dining with the world

2011-05-15T18:04:00.000-04:00

In the past two weeks, I have been having very close encounters with death in more ways than one. A dear friend from my primary school days who just entered a seminary in the Philippines as a late vocation died hours after a terrible automobile accident. The mini-van he in was hit by an on-coming bus. He suffered the worst injuries.

Just last week, I anointed an elderly parishioner in the hospital and it was only half an hour after I left the hospital that she passed away, with her family by her side.

A close friend’s mother has been in a coma after suffering a stroke whilst overseas, and lies in a hospital bed till today, hooked up to a machine that monitors her vitals constantly. Fed by a Ryle’s Tube daily, the family had been told to ‘be ready’ at various junctures.

When life presents itself with a variety of death and close-to-death scenarios, the inevitable question that flashes across the mind’s eye is something that prompts one to ask “how does one really prepare for death?”

For those of us who have constantly and consistently declared that Jesus is our way to eternal life, the answer must be found in looking at what Jesus did to prepare for his own death, as he has to be our model for life. We are told that before he died, he had supper with his disciples. Perhaps therein lies the key to the proper preparation for death, no matter how it may come to meet us.

But it is not simply the act of having a meal with loved ones that prepares us for death. It needs to be a meal within the context of a giving, where we, like Jesus, dare to give of ourselves in the most generous of ways. At that meal at the upper room, where the Eucharist was instituted, Jesus showed us the depth to which he was willing to go by giving us his body and blood. And he entrusted this to his disciples as an act to be kept giving and giving – to all, so that sins may be forgiven.

How does one become generous in the context of a meal? By eating with anyone and everyone, without reserve, and without condition. I have met wonderful examples of expansive sharing in people who dare to invite strangers to dine with them at feasts like the Chinese New Year reunion dinner and I have read about such families who offer a place at the family Thanksgiving dinner table to the homeless, simply because it is sad to be happy when someone is not.

The image of heaven that we get from scripture is often associated with a meal where, as Isaiah says, there is a banquet of rich food and fine wines. And if we are to really be prepared for this meal, we need to be also be prepared to eat with everybody. The good, the bad, the undeserving, the annoying, the irritating, all the different races, those of importune circumstance, and yes, those whom we do like and show favour to as well. The problem that most of us are plagued with is that we are not quite ready to sit down and eat with all. And that is when we are not quite ready for heaven.

I believe that it is when we are constantly pushing our limits and removing our borders to share with those who are the most difficult to share with, most difficult to love, and most difficult to understand that our lives become training ground for heaven.

How does keeping a comatose patient on a hospital bed make us ready? By not imposing the phrase ‘quality of life’ using worldly standards. It is when we dare to look beyond the Ryle’s Tube that brings liquid food through the patient’s gullet into the stomach, when we make that choice to speak to the infirm even though we get no answers back, and when we know that giving love means more than getting back love in return, and when we define ‘dignity’ in the broadest terms possible. These ready both the patient and we, the caregivers, for heaven’s banquet that will surely include people beyond our ken.

One more thing that really prepares us for heaven’s banquet is when we participate in the Mass regularly. At each Mass is a melting pot of people who come from all walks of life, and one can find at each Mass the pleasant and the peeved, the joyful and the cynical, the humble and the self-righteous, the holy and the holier-than-thou. But we don’t make judgements because we leave that to God. It is his meal anyway, and he invites all. It is when we make ourselves the judge that makes us not yet ready for heaven’s banquet.

I recall the story of how a priest once asked a young man why he wasn’t going in for Mass on Sunday and stood outside the Church instead. He said “Father, there are just so many in there who are sinful and prideful, pharisaical and hypocrites”, to which the priest said with a smile “oh, then please come on in – there’s always room for one more”.

When joy at someone's death can reveal how dead we are

2011-05-08T18:03:00.002-04:00

Last Monday, the world learnt largely through the internet the unfolding of the news of the death of Osama bin Laden. This news was met by various groups of people, and the media showed how they reacted to it. The New York Times webpage showed many clips and photos of people who were jubilant and ecstatic, almost as if America had won some major international sporting event, with car horns blaring into the dawn. I must say that I was bothered and saddened as I saw what went on.

I tried putting myself into the shoes of the many millions of lives who had been badly affected by terrorism. Yes, I myself may not have been directly affected in large ways. Perhaps in small ways, I was. I have become more careful and vigilant about my surroundings, perhaps living in some degree of paranoia, and insecurity, and it is most apparent when I need to travel internationally. Visits to the States nowadays require us to remove all footwear, undergo scans and searches, and accept these as de rigueur. But I cannot say that I have lost a loved one in the collapse and destruction on the World Trade Centre in New York on Sept 11 2001, or even known anyone personally who did. Putting myself in their shoes, it would not be hard to feel the anger, resentment and bitterness that can envelope and darken one's world, and want some form of retribution. But when news of Bin Laden’s death is announced, would I rejoice and be happy?

The larger and more important question that every single one of us needs to ask ourselves is why would anyone's death make us happy? The fact that another human being who shares my very same dignity as God's child is no longer alive, no longer breathing and existing in this form must weaken my own existence. Of course, the greater the contribution that this person made to humanity, the more I will be aware of this, and feel a certain diminution of my own humanity.

But what if this other human being was an apparent mastermind behind some very heinous and egregious crimes against humanity? Can this justify extermination? The upholding of the dignity of every human person is a very Catholic (read UNIVERSAL) mind, which unfortunately, is not very universal. What seems to be much more universal is an 'eye-for-an-eye' mentality which makes us all live in a very inhumane way. Some of us may even argue quite convincingly that now that Osama bin Laden is dead, the world is a safer place. But doesn't this also mean that we who have sanctioned, supported and justified a man's murder have failed to make the world a safer place too?

The Blessed Karol Wojtyla, also known to the world as the late Pope John Paul II who was beatified only last week in Rome sent the world the key to universal peace and healing when he went to the prison cell to forgive his assassin Mehmet Ali Agca after he recovered from the assassination attempt in 1981.

Yes, it is true that Agca never plotted a wave of terror or sent planes into buildings killing thousands of innocent people. He never masterminded anything close to a network of terrorists in various parts of the world. But numbers alone cannot justify our sense of elation, jubilation and joy at the death of any one person. And it must not. It is because we think in terms of numbers and have a disjointed sense of justice that we find ourselves picketing for the upholding of the death penalty instead of a chance for reform or long-term incarceration to keep dangerous minds from harming innocent folk. And we think we are better off with one of us dead.

Two thousand years after the public cry for the release of Barabbas in exchange for the crucifixion of Jesus, we should have learnt the tremendous lesson of forgiveness when he said from the Cross "forgive them for they know not what they do". The Blessed Pope John Paul II put that into action in that jail visit to Agca in 1981.

Apparently, most of us haven't yet learnt that lesson well, and feel more or less justified with the deaths that we cause or feel jubilant over, all in the name of 'justice'.

The pure gift of Divine Mercy

2011-05-01T18:05:00.000-04:00

The use of analogies to bring about a clearer and almost instant understanding of a viewpoint is a tool used by many throughout the ages. The more clearly the analogy parallels life and the material being discussed, the greater the effect.

Parodies do this too. Satires like George Orwell’s Animal Farm are classics which can be taken as plain and simple one dimensional stories, or, when brought to the world of politics of the time, spoke most eloquently in an allegorical way, of what was happening in a world power.

The mystery and wonder of Christ’s Divine Mercy is a most awesome and compelling truth to behold for us Catholics. The belief that St Faustina started this is as erroneous as saying that Singapore Airlines started aviation. What that holy Polish mystic did was to become a channel through which God’s continued revelation of his Divine Mercy, which is at the heart of Heaven, allows the lowliest among us any chance at all of enjoying the beatific vision after we die.

The term “Paschal mystery” refers to the suffering, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and it really is also the Divine Mercy played out in slow motion. What? How can the cruel and torturous death of the Son of God be anything close to mercy? It seems much more cruel and cold-blooded than merciful. How can someone made to die for the world’s sin be a demonstration of mercy? How can what seems to be abandonment by even God the Father convey mercy? To be sure, it doesn’t immediately show it.

But that is why it is Divine Mercy. God’s mercy is so deep and so unfathomable that it is not something that the eye, mind or heart can readily perceive and absorb. We want Mercy to be so easily spelled out and often, we want to be able to deserve it, to work for it, to earn it and to even control it. Largely because, if we are honest with ourselves, we want others to deserve, work for, and even earn our mercy when they ask us for it.

Well, Divine Mercy is Divine because it is pure gift, and we don’t deserve it. Someone died in our place and we don’t deserve it. Someone took on our sins and we don’t deserve it. We can’t figure out the logic of it, because you can’t figure out the logic of love, especially if it is God’s love.

I always say that the wonder of our Christian religion is not that we love God, but that this God shows us just how crazy he is for us and he searches for us up and down the ages. And when we really get this, that is the moment we will truly begin to respond to the Divine Mercy that is open to us, and we will want to be agents of this mercy ourselves.

The problem that a lot of people have with this incredible abundance of God’s mercy is that they have developed a resistance towards giftedness and blessedness. And I think this is especially so in a meritocratic country like Singapore, where one needs to prove, to work towards, to attain, to earn and to be credible in order for one to get somewhere. And it cuts across so many levels in our society. From gaining entry to secondary schools, to universities, to getting jobs and even gaining places in Parliament. If you want a place, you have to earn it. You can’t ride on someone else’s name or position or track record. Well, at least not all the time.

So, in the last week and in the next week, we in this tiny island republic will see a lot of debate about who has the credentials, the smarts or the worthiness to be voted into Parliament at the May 7 General Election. If we are so shaped by what’s going on in the world of politics, and simply transfer this mind to the way that we think about God’s mercy and justice, then we will obviously also think that we need to work for Divine Mercy, and merit it, and earn it. And we will do a grave injustice to Divine Mercy because it has nothing at all to do with worthiness and merit.

There are many who are critical about how in Singapore, the GRC (Group Representation Constituencies) system allows into parliament people who if left on their own in single seat wards will have no chance in hell to get in. Actually, the mercy of God is like that kind of system too. Only in our case, GRC stands for God’s Redemptive Cross, where we literally ride on Jesus’ merciful and glorious wounds to get to heaven. Because left on our own merits, we will be dumb as sand, and unable to do much.

But only because of Divine Mercy and forgiveness can we ever hope for heaven. Yes, only because of Divine Mercy can we even say that salvation is in the bag, and when we see our sins, we will recognize our stupidity and no longer make any excuses for our silly sinful selves and will honestly call a spade a spade. The moment we see the splendour that awaits us, we will literally have nothing to say because in the light of amazing Divine Mercy, we will not know what to say.

Holding on to the resurrection events

2011-04-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

In all the major accounts of the resurrection of Jesus in the gospels, we are not told that he stayed with the witnesses for any prolonged period of time. In fact, in some of them, we are told that he disappeared at the breaking of the bread. This makes it extremely hard for us to pinpoint what it is that defines the resurrection of Jesus. And if it is hard for us to wrap our minds around it, it would be just as difficult for us to make it clear for ourselves what the resurrection would be. After all, we seem to have very little to hold on to, causing our detractors (read atheists) to say that our belief in the resurrection of Jesus is some sort of “pie-in-the-sky”.

Perhaps this is the problem as well as the solution, if “solution” is the correct word to use. Jesus did tell Mary of Magdala in the resurrection account in John’s gospel not to hold on to him. There’s something that doesn’t allow for his witnesses to hold on to him. The human tendency for us is to hold on to as much as we can because we cannot deal with change and transience well. We only need look at the Transfiguration event to see that we all have that human tendency to want to build tents on the mountain top and not ruin a good thing. We resist any call for change and fluidity, but God does not. Yes, we do know that God is immutable, but he is also called the unmoved mover as well.

But we only need to look at life and see that permanence of any sort does not really exist. Our lives are not permanent, our addresses are not permanent, and neither are our jobs and our health. What we need to do is to learn how to cope with change well, and unfortunately, in my experiences with folk who have changes thrust into their lives in unceremonious fashion, change is not only difficult, but extremely frightening as well.

I suspect the reason why the resurrection accounts in the bible are so fluid and fleeting is because our own experiences of resurrections in life have the same character. We are not joyful all the time, neither are we elated, ebullient and exuberant. But having said that, neither are the antitheses of these – our sadness, our mourning, our pains and sorrows are also not permanent. The resurrection joy and energy that Jesus wants to give us is to allow us to be aware of these resurrection moments when they happen in our lives, and to see that these are glimpses of something that have a permanence not in this life, but the next. And what gives us hope always is the chance of a new start.

This is why Jesus always mentions to the disciples – go to Galilee. Why Galilee? It’s not so much a physical place, but a time when it all began; a place where the disciples were first called, a time when fish were caught aplenty and when boats were left on the shore. Jesus wants them to recall and to start over again. That is what reconciliation and forgiveness is about.

We all have our Galilee moments. When friendships falter, when dreams fade and when romance seems to be just a figment of our imagination, we need to go back to Galilee too. It is there that we will see the Lord calling us again – calling us to love in ever expansive ways.

Why Good Friday is so good

2011-04-17T18:03:00.000-04:00

The past week saw us priests in many parts of the island, and I am sure other parts of the world as well, hearing confession after confession in penitential services in parishes and other similar settings. This wonderful opportunity offers, en masse, the healing touch of God’s salve of forgiveness and mercy to the wounded souls and hearts of the faithful.

What I noticed in so many confessions is a certain problem that seems to plague very many penitents, and I must admit that even I have succumbed to it on more than a few occasions. It is anger that I am talking about.

So many people have come to confession, admitting that they have allowed anger to take over them; almost swallowing them up on numerous occasions, and sometimes, this had led to their abusing (perhaps not physically) others. I always try to stress to these folk that the feeling of anger is not a sin, as it is just that – a feeling. Feelings have no morality attached to them. It’s when feelings give in to and lead us into dark violence that sin takes over us like the way a dark cloud breaks into pelting rain over the landscape called life. Where can we find an alternative to this violence that seems to consume so many of us? What is the way out? Is there one?

The mystery that is Good Friday is, as one spiritual writer put it so graphically, akin to a carefully cut diamond. The brilliance that each facet reveals depends on the angle of light that bounces off each of its multifarious surfaces. But what really gives the Cross the brilliance that no beautiful earthly gem can reveal is the resplendence of God’s non-violence. The cross of Calvary upon which hung the Saviour of the World radiates non-violence precisely because it had absorbed all the violence of the world in Christ’s dramatic decision to love. Why does every scene of the Calvary moment, every image of the crucifix, every depiction of the suffering bruised, bleeding, beaten and agonizing God-man seem to steal our breath away? Because what is beyond words, what is beyond a cheap title or explanation is the immense depth of the non-violent nature of God and the non-violent nature of divine love.

When we don’t ponder enough at what is being revealed at Christ’s crucifixion, we will probably end up repeating what caused him to end up there on the first Good Friday. Each one of our displays of anger that have caused a hurt or a wound in our fellow man becomes in a similar way, the very reason Christ was nailed to the Cross. The Goodness that Good Friday reveals is that despite the injustice, despite the unfairness, despite the false accusations and jealousies, God did not and will not retaliate with violence. It was a conscious choice not to do so. And unless we appreciate this over and over again, we will do just the opposite of what Jesus chose not to do that Friday two thousand years ago.

Of course, it is of no credit to us Christians that we missed this point by more than a mile when we look back at the nefarious and egregious acts of violence that have dotted our own history, where ‘holy wars’ have been waged, using shamelessly, God’s name. It raises the question whether there really are such things as ‘just’ wars. Hopefully, the more we learn about our dark past, the more we will realize that history must not repeat itself.

That is why we need to constantly do as a community what the Good Friday liturgy invites us to do. To behold the wood of the Cross, and to see its revelation by the celebrant part by part by part, till it is fully exposed for us to worship and adore. To kneel before the Cross and to allow its deafening silence of non-violence to whisper its message and power into our closed ears and hearts.

The more anger we harbour in ourselves, the more we need to worship before the Cross of Christ.

Our greatest gift is given away, not taken from us.

2011-04-10T18:05:00.000-04:00

Why did Jesus sweat blood in the garden of Gethsamane? This is a strange phenomenon which is featured only in Luke’s telling of the passion of the Christ. Apparently, there is a medical term for this, and it is called hematohidrosis. It’s extremely rare, and this happens because the anxiety one experiences swell or dilate the blood vessels so much that those around the sweat glands rupture, causing the blood to mix with the sweat, pushing the blood to the surface, and out onto the skin. One could suppose that it was because Luke was the only doctor among the four evangelists that he mentioned this detail. It is not featured in Mark, Matthew or John’s account.

Some would argue that the word ‘hosei’ in the Greek renders as “like” blood, meaning that it was not blood, but something like, or akin to. Whether or not blood was used as a metaphor or whether it was literal, we need to see what significance sweating blood had for Luke’s readers and for all of us.

The most precious and meaningful things that anyone can have from us are the things that we give away freely. It could be our time, our attention, our material possessions or our money. But we resent it when it is taken from us without our wanting to part with it. The more precious things are to us, the more significant it will be when the recipient realizes that there was an effort in our parting with it.

This insight came to me as I was preparing for a talk last week on Jesus’ Agony in the Garden. We all know that in the process of the scourging and beatings, ending with his crucifixion, Jesus had blood taken from him. Mel Gibson’s controversial movie “The Passion of the Christ” brings all the gore and pain out in clear and vivid detail. Jesus had so much taken from him, and it ended with his death. The fact that the soldier pierced Jesus’ side with the lance after he had died, issuing out blood and water, reminds us that these life-giving and life-sustaining elements were extracted from him.

Jesus knew that his giving of his life was going to save the world and to give it life. But before it was going to be taken from him, before the life-giving elements were going to be robbed from him, he had to give it away freely. Could the evangelist Luke be saying that his body’s giving up of the blood by sweating it voluntarily before he was going to be made to do through the scourging is what saves the world.

Looking at it from this angle, it reminds us all that our free will is one of the most valuable things that we have as human beings. The Church has always taught that God wants us to exercise our free will because it is in freedom that when love and life are given, the values are highest. God doesn’t make us do anything, simply because anyone made to love doesn’t really love.

We only need to forward our reading of Luke’s rendering of the passion of Christ a chapter away and see this revealed in the last uttered phrase of Jesus on the Cross to see this once more. He says to the Father “into your hands, I commit my spirit”. The spirit of Jesus is never taken from him. He hands it over to the Father in love, and that is what saves the world.

In many of our struggles to love, we fight this ‘handing over’ so much. Its violence tears us apart on so many levels. It is what disintegrates us.

But when we hand over our wills freely in love, not because of a duty, not because one has no choice, we imitate Christ and do our part in ‘saving’ the world.

The urge to fall asleep in the Garden of Gethsamane

2011-04-03T18:05:00.000-04:00

As we approach the heaviness of Holy Week, we will begin the great mother of all liturgies of the Holy Triduum by participating in the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday night. In all churches throughout the world, this Mass will precede the placing of the Blessed Sacrament at the Altar of Repose, where the faithful are invited to spend time with the Lord, like the way Jesus himself invited his nearest and dearest disciples to stay awake with him in the Garden of Gethsamane. There seems to be some traditions extant in some cultures to get busy with church visitations, hopping from one church to another, but this has never been the intention of leaving the church open till midnight on this day. It is primarily to allow us to really spend (at least) a solid hour in prayer before the Lord, staying with him in his agony.

But as the disciples failed and fell asleep, so too do we in life. In Luke’s gospel text, we are told that the reason they fell asleep was ‘due to sheer grief’. We’d probably understand it better, and perhaps even relate to their sleeping better, if we were told that they slept due to fatigue, or due to extreme tiredness. After all, when we are tired, that is what our bodies tell us to do – sleep. But to sleep for sheer grief? What gives?

This may be seen as a metaphor for our collective unwillingness to really face what needs to be faced in life. What did the disciples experience prior to this Gethsamane outing? They were at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, where he gave them his body and his blood – where he literally gave them himself. It was not just the Passover that they celebrated. It was something truly groundbreaking. Their beloved master Jesus just gave them himself, and not just that, he gave them a great order that they too, must give themselves and break of themselves in a similar fashion. They probably knew that the coveted Jer 31:31 verse that all Jews were waiting for to happen was unfolding right before their very eyes, but they little did they know that this new covenant was going to be something they themselves were to perform and live out. This realization could well be the source of their ‘grief’. This was, and is, going to be hard.

When baptism is only seen as something that is received by a convert to the faith, it is rather easy to accept. Baptism then becomes something that is done ‘to me’, where all I have to do is to bend my head over some water font, and let the water trickle over my head. Nothing grief-rending there. And yes, it can be something that is rather ‘feel good’.

But it is when the converted disciple comes to the realization that this is now something that requires a constant response of a dying to the self; of choosing the more difficult task; of a call to greater generosity; of a need to be more selfless; of the demand to give more than one receives in life, one will sooner or later, feel the grief of the real Christian challenge.

We don’t often come to that realization in our everyday living. Most of us are far too busy with our lives and families. Sometimes, when the Church recommends pathways to spiritual greatness that may require of us to put aside some of our plans and ideas, it is, understandably, very easy to not want to respond positively, and think that the Church, or even God, is simply idealistic. I believe this kind of realization comes when one is faced with the weightier matters of life, and knows that real love has a price to pay.

Examples of this are when one is faced with the reality of accepting a special-needs child to the family, or having a suddenly handicapped or bed-ridden family member to look after; or when one is faced with a tragic failure in life. The grief of needing to respond to this with the attitude of being Eucharist can be mind numbing and one can escape through wanting to sleep. Of course, it is far more than just the physical act of going to sleep. The ‘sleep’ can be seen in refusing to talk about the matter; finding ways to escape the challenge to love at hand; to just do the bare minimal or just brushing off any possibility of going deep.

I believe that we must want to choose to spend that hour with the Lord in the Garden of Gethsamane on Holy Thursday night. And we do not do this alone. In fact, when we do that, we stay there consciously with the broken world, which in millions of ways has chosen to sleep rather than stay awake. On this night, it is not the prayers that we can mouth that are important. Rather, it is the choice, out of love, to just stay there with the Lord and with one another that can transform and strengthen.

The confidence to do this must come from the fact that like that night at the first Holy Thursday, the Lord is just a stone’s throw away from us, kneeling down and praying.

Opening doors – an unspoken task of Lent

2011-03-27T18:35:00.001-04:00

Lent is often seen as a time to keep our spiritual houses clean, to do ‘spring cleaning’ for our souls, and to see where we need to readjust our sights so that our targets are truly set on the Lord and his will in our lives. All those are considered good in our classical Catholic spiritual tradition, and they are good spiritual exercises for us all. They put us in good stead to keep ourselves aligned onto “God’s beam”, as Fr Robert Barron likes to say.

Well, here’s my take on Lent. I have come to see that it is a time for opening doors. This is largely because as we grow physically in our lives, we seem to ironically close a whole series of doors that we think are either troublesome to keep opened, or are terribly frightening to see the things that lie on the other side of them. In retreats and with good spiritual guidance and direction, one is often led to the more difficult task of identifying these doors, and to open them. Often, it is the demons that supposedly lie behind these doors that become powerless once the doors are open. The interior life beckons us to do the harder task of finding the keys to these doors.

But the strange thing about opening these doors is that one cannot rush into the task as if it were a task to be completed within a predetermined span of time, like as if we were rushing to ‘beat the clock’. True spiritual transformation requires what is known as the ‘law of gradualness’. It’s a bit like physical development in a human being. The prima ballerina in a dance company has taken years of discipline and sacrifice to finally come to be able to dance with the kind of verve and panache that she does on stage. The violinist who plays with such vivacity and enthusiasm didn’t come to do that within a day, but only after years and years of drills and practices to make what he does now look so easy and effortless. The same goes for our quest for spiritual transformation. We are always a work-in-process, and are never quite finished with one Lent or one retreat. I believe that each of us awakens slowly.

Can we force inner maturity? Hardly. Those of us who are painful perfectionists can’t wait for the process to end. Each time we come to some groundbreaking point in our spiritual lives, we will inevitably see that somewhere in the background is something else that remains unaddressed. The problem lies in the fact that so many of us think that the goal is to get somewhere. Richard Rohr said it so well when he said that the goal is to be in harmony with the gifts that are already given, and that the goal is to fall in love with your life. No one who truly loves can say “I loved”, as if it were a perfected act that has reached completion. Love, as is life, is always something that is in the present, and ever evolving.

When the disciplines of Lent are seriously undertaken, with the correct disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, a metanoia or change is resulted. But we often want it to end by the time we celebrate Easter at the end of 40 days. Not only is this unrealistic, but also rather dangerous, because change that happens in a couple of weeks is only cosmetic at best. But true life-changing and spirit-shaping takes a far more longer time.

One of the most significant books on the Sacraments of the Catholic Church that I have come across was written by Joseph Martos, entitled Doors to the Sacred. I believe that it has come to be prescribed reading for many students in Sacred Liturgy, and it gives a detailed account of the historical and spiritual development of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, which are really doors that open the disciple of Christ to a transformed life. As we approach Easter and the post-Easter season through the discipline of Lent, we as Church are also asked to journey with the Elect in their approach towards the Sacraments of Initiation. We mustn’t fall into the mistake of just observing this from a distance, but rather, we should as Church re-visit these sacraments personally, to see how much further we have moved past these doorways in our own lives. And we can often miss this opportunity when we choose not to participate at the Holy Saturday Liturgy, aptly called the Mother of all Liturgies.

If we don’t, perhaps what has happened to many of us is that we have simply stayed at the jamb of the door, and have hesitated to go in through the opened doors to a deep and real relationship with God, and find him, and to also find ourselves.

Finding healing through our own wounds

2011-03-20T18:03:00.001-04:00

One of the most enlightened titles of spiritual books that I have come across is The Wounded Healer by the late Henri Nouwen. It is a book primarily to encourage ministers to not negate their wounds, but to identify them so that it forms a compassionate starting point for ministry.

But most of us who do minister to the wounded tend to not want to do this. It comes from a (misunderstood) standpoint where we as ministers or priests have all the answers, hold all the positions of security, and think that it is ours to lead all the time. To be sure, there is a very necessary role for the minister tending to the wounded of their flock to be a leader and to show direction. But it is certainly not a truism that the perfect minister is the one who has no inner wounds, and is perfect before he can help others find their footing in life.

Perhaps it is something in our misunderstood or under-understood male psychology that prefers not to identify our own individual weakness and wounds. “I’m fine” is a very common response to an injury that one encounters in the game called life. And falsely, many of us do think that it requires the stoic and perfected counselor or spiritual director to lead one from woundedness to wholeness. I say that it is false, because there are no perfect counselors.

The most common way to deal with our woundedness is to deny it is there. Many people can go through life in denial. Of course, the talk-show mentality has surfaced in the past decade or so, where the other end of the wounded spectrum is seen. What I am referring to is the phenomenon where people with a wounded past almost take delight in doing some form of public exposition of their wounded past in front of millions of television viewers, thinking that this will somehow set things right. Certainly, mixed in there somewhere can be detected the person’s proverbial desire of five minutes of fame, but a healing hardly results, ending up with greater wounds than one began with.

What is required by everyone - counselor, counselee, minister and leader, is the sacred handling of these wounds. When carefully handled and with the proper salve given through loving and prayerful and charitable friendships and support systems, the very wounds that one had tried to deny and escape from can in fact become the very platforms that makes one a credible co-sojourner in life.
It brings to mind a quotation often attributed to French philosopher Albert Camus - Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

The perfect minister is myth. I believe that that is a myth because even Our Lord Jesus, the healer of all healers needed to be wounded before the world was healed of its own wounds. What we do need is great humility to see this in ourselves, and to allow ourselves to see the world through our own wounds.

Our search for what we have

2011-03-13T18:01:00.000-04:00

There is a prevalent strain in many spiritual authors, both men and women that speak of the human need to go out and find oneself and this is not new. Early Church Fathers and monks and mystics have written about this quest for us to have to go out on a search.

But what is also very common is for us to write the corollary – which is the fact that after all the searching, all the exploration, wanderlusting, all the scaling of mountains both metaphorical and physical, man will come to realize that what he has been looking for, trying to find a meaning to, and what he deemed to have been elsewhere and ‘out there’, has been within him all along.

And it was a strange necessity for him to go out and find what he thought was to be attained by exiting, when all he really needed to do was to ‘enter into’ within.

It’s the other way of saying that the two halves of life are really existent in each one of us. The first half consists of our need to attain, collect, amass, strive for, conquer, climb and overtake. The second half sees us contented and secure enough to do just the opposite – to allow, to divest, to let go, to face defeat and failure, to descend and to yield.

But it doesn’t mean that the first half is unnecessary and a waste of time and energy. Neither is it futile, or something that should be avoided at all costs. If our human need for actualization doesn’t take place, it would be tantamount to not putting into use the gifts given us by a gracious God.

It only becomes problematic when we think that life is only about the first half, without coming to that crucial point of realizing that the outgoing energy is meant to reach a zenith, and return to find placidity and rest, as St Augustine said ‘to find rest in God’.

When we go out helter-skelter to find what we think is only out there, we may miss something deep and resonant, and that is that what we look for has been deep within all along.

In the tradition of the Church, one of the Stations of the Cross is “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus”. Nowhere in Sacred Scripture is this recorded that on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, that there was this encounter between Jesus and the said woman Veronica. The story goes that Veronica, so moved with pity for the tortured Jesus, goes out of her way to use her veil to wipe Jesus’ blood-stained and grime covered face. Her reward was that the image of the Divine Face was miraculously imprinted on that veil, as a gift and reward for an act of kindness shown. No one has seen this veil, and perhaps this is good.

Why? Because if there is such a veil that exists, millions may flock to it to admire it, to pay devotion to it and to revere it. That in itself is not a bad thing if it leads us to be remorseful of our sinfulness and to love God in a more intense way. But in only doing that, what we may miss out on is the fact that there is an image that exists not somewhere ‘out there’ on a veil, but rather, ‘inside’ each one of us.

We are, after all, made in the image and likeness of God, and we forget this all too easily. After all, the etymology of Veronica is “true image”, or in Latin “a vera icon”.

The struggle to let go

2011-03-06T16:58:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered two funerals of people, both of whom died of cancer. In both cases, there was a painful parting of spouses at the point of death, as is usually the case. It was easy to feel much empathy for their loss. And in both cases, I was told that when the time for that parting came, the spouses who were going to be left behind told the one who was dying “it’s ok, you can go safely to Jesus who waits for you”, or in similar words. Both cases struggled with a difficult parting.

These sharings tugged at my heartstrings because they brought home the fact that this is something each one of us human beings struggle with throughout our lives – that tension between holding on, acquiring, attaining and the antitheses of these, which is a releasing, a loosening of one’s grip, and letting go. In the world of flora and fauna, there is a similar struggle that goes on. Only perhaps less dramatic and painful.

I remember having a potted Phalaenopsis on my desk a couple of years ago. This is the Orchid that also goes by the common name “Moth Orchid”. I acquired it at the height of its full blooming glory, and it had a most beautiful cascade of elegant flowers arching over my desk lamp. This bloom was very hardy, and it managed to keep its brilliance and beauty for slightly over seven weeks. By the eighth week, the flowers started to wilt, and one by one, the withered and shriveled blooms began dropping from the stem. But each one was clinging on tenaciously till the very last moment. If nature in its inchoate forms like plants show a resilience towards parting with life, what more when we humans are on top of the pyramid of creation?

Much as spiritual writers and life-teachers remind us often that life is not about acquiring, attaining, grasping, collecting and building up, but divesting, giving up, surrender and release, each one of us will find it a struggle, at least on some level, to make that final letting go. What makes it easier and less painful will be when the people around us give us their blessing to do this.

I believe that is what happened to the two dying people. What is a blessing in its deepest level? It is an acknowledgement; a permission; a validation; a giving of confidence and an assurance. Even a blessing of houses, medals, statues and holy cards have this at its deepest essence. A good blessing of a house gives one the confidence to live there, knowing that they are secure in God’s loving embrace and presence. A blessing of a statue imparts a sense of assurance that the saint whose image the statue bears will be praying for us, and that we are not alone in our struggles. A blessing of a crucifix gives us great hope that our carrying of our individual crosses of life is never something that we do alone, and that Jesus carried one too.

A blessing at death’s door by our loved ones does all that and more. It assures the one dying that they will not be forgotten; that they are loved, and that the ones remaining behind are in good hands – and give them permission and blessing to go into hands that love them far more ours ever can. The hands of God.

When Reality Shows Don’t Show Reality

2011-02-27T17:01:00.001-05:00

Our current world seems to be obsessed with reality television. It takes form in so many different ways and the hunger for this kind of entertainment drives the moguls of the television world to up their ante and take their audience to higher levels of adrenalin rushes.

I was watching with reflective amusement at the latest American Idol telecast a couple of days ago and it showed hopeful contestants walking a dramatically long walkway to sit before the three judges to receive from them a verdict of whether they were going to be in the final 24 or sent home. From this point on in the contest, if they are in the group of finalists, they will no longer be judged by the three, but by the television viewers who will vote via the phone lines. Each time the contestant came before the judges, they reminded them that from this point on, it is the public who will decide who they want to pick for their next American Idol. The phrase that was constantly being used was “we are looking for someone who has the whole package”. Contestants were often asked, “do you have the entire package?”

I can only fathom a guess as to what this ‘entire package’ is. It probably means that the person needs to sing, look good, dance well, be friendly and amiable, be charming enough to win the hearts (and votes) of the public, and in the end sell the records or CDs that will be produced as part of the winning contract.

So, it is apparent that the winner is going to be decided and determined by how much they pander to and please their ‘idol worshippers’. If they don’t live up to their expectations, or meet with what they deem to be the standards that ‘idols’ should have, they won’t get their votes. Understandably, the contestants will do all that they can to ‘jump the hoops’ that their audience set and get them pleased as punch in order that they won’t be knocked out.

In many of my conversations with people who have stopped coming to Church or have stopped believing in God altogether, one of the very common reasons that they cite is that God had not answered their prayers. Inevitably, they will quote me Matthew 7:7-11, where Jesus says “ask and you will be given; seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you”. Having asked and not been given; having sought and not found, and having knocked and still have doors closed in the face could be rather discouraging, especially when times were desperate.

Could the ‘idol voter’ mentality could be working here, causing many to abandon their belief in God simply because God had not performed according to their expectations? After all, in remaining silent and not opening doors that had been rapped on, God has failed to ‘jump the hoops’, and had not delivered the ‘whole package’. It does seem then to legitimize a ‘vote’ against God out of the whole ‘idol’ contest, and put other ‘idols’ who can deliver.

I’m afraid that when this happens, we have begun to do the unthinkable – making ourselves judges of God himself, putting him on the spot and putting him out of the spotlight of our lives.

Do we do this consciously? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Yet, if one reflects a bit deeper on the state of spiritual affairs, where many are no longer going to church and believing in God, it does appear that God is being punished, edged out, and banished from many lives simply because he has not met our expectations. It could well be that illness was not met with a healing, crises were not tended to, and broken hearts were not mended.

What does Matthew 7:7-11 have to say about this? Jesus doesn’t lie, so his promises do hold. Maybe we need to ask ourselves if we asked for the correct things to be given us, or sought what really needed seeking, and knocked on the correct doors. If we are only willing to worship a god who meets our standards and expectations, aren’t we then guilty of an egregious sin of idol worshipping? In humility, we need to vacate the judgment bench and ask God to take his rightful place.

And as we rely on his Divine Mercy, may we truly let reality show.

The benefit of pain

2011-02-20T17:03:00.003-05:00

Most of us have heard of the phrase “no pain, no gain”. In the world of exercise and fitness, this is uttered by trainers who encourage their trainees who complain of pain as a result of having activated muscles which have otherwise been unused before. To avoid this pain, many choose not to exercise altogether.

In fact, avoidance of pain seems to be an unspoken quest by millions the world over. Some choose not to enter certain relationships so that ‘pain’ can be avoided. Married couples choose to raise certain ‘painful’ topics which can result in arguments with volcanic repercussions. Various addictions can result from finding in them ways to ‘escape’ facing pains in life.

In the medical world, there exists a condition called CIPA or Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis. This is an extremely rare medical condition where the sufferer is born without the ability to sense pain or extreme temperatures at all. At first glance, it does seem like a good thing, doesn’t it? One can imagine life to be so different and carefree, when one can live life with less care about getting injured, and move about as if one was invincible. No more fearing injections or maybe even going for operations without the need to have anesthesia.

But take it a step further and one can imagine all sorts of complications that can result of being unable to feel pain. Think of little children who walk into rough walls scraping skin and not feeling blood streaming from their forehead, or biting their lips till they bleed, and not stopping because they don’t feel the pain, or literally rubbing their eyes out, of plunging their hands into boiling water without thinking about the pain, but resulting in terrible scalding. Indeed, sensing pain is actually necessary for proper growth and protection in life.

So too for our spiritual lives. There are without doubt, many experiences of pain in our lives. Just go to any Novena session where petitions letters are read out, and you will see the various kinds of pains and sufferings that many are going through daily in their lives. Underlying the letters seems to be a request that these instances of pain be removed from their lives, so that happiness can be attained. I do empathise and do pray for people suffering from pain and have sufferings of various kinds, but I am suggesting that a different approach to suffering can help us in a way that many of us have not thought about. And that approach is to ask “what?” Not “why?”

Asking ‘why is this pain happening in my life’ is a very common question. One doesn’t need to be living on a higher plane of existence to ask this. Anybody experiencing suffering of any sort asks this. But when our spiritual lives begin maturing, we need to change that question to a ‘what’. ‘What can I learn from this pain?’ or ‘what is this suffering teaching me about myself, about life, and about God?’ In my encounter with people, this question is not often asked, but it is a transformative question.

To ask God to remove all our pain could be the worst thing that we can be asking from him. We could be asking him to prevent all possibilities of true growth that comes from our experience of pain and suffering. We could be asking God to give us a case of spiritual CIPA.

Our good Catholic spirituality must instead help us to embrace what is known as ‘Redemptive Suffering’ where suffering becomes transformative not just for ourselves but for the world as well. This is when our suffering is carried with a purpose and a decision to love. It is to offer our suffering to God and ask him to use this in an act of loving surrender.

“No pain; no gain” could thus then be applied to our spiritual lives as well.

Where are you?

2011-02-13T17:01:00.001-05:00

In opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, after Adam sinned, Yahweh is heard asking Adam “where are you?”

It appears that God is clueless about Adam’s whereabouts. God seems to have lost sight of Adam, and is trying to ‘find’ him. The ensuing response from Adam was that he was afraid of God because he heard the sound of God in the garden. And that is very interesting.

Where was Adam? In reality, he was right inside of Eden, which was God’s place, where all was provided for, and where there was abundance. Eden was also God’s splendid creation, where man and woman were the crown of his creation. It’s not that God didn’t know where Adam was that he asked him that seemingly simple question. Rather, it was Adam who didn’t know where he was. And that was the crux (and has since been) of humankind’s bane.

When we are not clear about how loved we are, how secure we are held in God’s loving plan, we will run all about trying to find new thrills and spills in order to justify our existence. And as any sociologist will be able to tell you, this is a never ending, never fully satisfying and an always falling-short-of-complete-fulfillment enterprise of the human heart. In Rev Fr Rolheiser’s column on the internet last week he gave very clear examples of how our human mind and heart are on this never-ending quest for more and more, always afraid that there’s not enough. But that is illusory.

It was Adam’s fear that there was also not enough in Eden that caused him to stretch out his hand to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And it has been evil’s intent to always make us insecure and want more and more. And this brings me back to God’s first question to Adam “where are you?”

Adam didn’t realize that he was in Eden, where God’s providence was in abundance, and that there was no need of any fear. Adam didn’t know how good he had it, and to Eve’s discredit, neither did she.

Someone once said wisely that the difference between Christianity and other religions can be summed up this way – almost all other religions will have us human beings looking for God, but Christianity’s unique feature has God looking for us. Understood this way, then it opens us to the reality that we are in God’s ambit of love, and our struggles and problems are really precipitated by the fact that like Adam, we too don’t know where we are. Christianity wakes us up to the fact that God has been looking for us, and that we have been playing hide-and-go-seek with him.

What marks a holy person is evidenced that he or she has a certain confidence in God’s prevailing presence in the world despite the many evils that are present. Any saint whose life guides us on our way to heaven becomes a beacon of hope amidst the pains and turmoil that none of our lives are spared of. Our pride and quest for independence has us going our way without wanting any help. This will only get us deeper into our messes, causing us to ‘hide’ as Adam did because he was afraid of God, who was never meant to be feared in the first place.

In a real life analogy, I was driving in one of Singapore’s tunnels just last week, and this tunnel (KPE) is notorious for its may speed cameras that will photograph cars going above 70km/h. As it was in the middle of the afternoon, there were not many cars in the tunnel, and I was happily cruising along, not realizing that my foot was getting heavy on the pedal. A glance at the speedometer showed to my horror that I was hitting 85km/h. Instinctively I slowed down and saw that with no vehicles in front of me, there is a tendency to speed without even realizing it. What I did then was to make sure that I was driving behind a car that was keeping the speed limit.

It was then that I saw that even in our lives, if the moral road ahead of us is totally free and open, we have every tendency to speed out of control, to our detriment. But if we make that choice to ‘drive’ behind holy people and saints, not only are we assured of where we are heading towards, but also at the same time, we will be travel at a safe speed. They who go before us, lead the way, and remind us like Adam needed reminding, ‘where we are’ in God’s loving plan.

Why Mary is important to us as Church

2011-02-06T17:01:00.000-05:00

Devotion to Mary is a very common Catholic tradition. Even people who don’t know anything deep or essential about Catholicism, the illiterate or the uneducated have been known to say that the difference between Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity is that the former is the ‘Jesus’ one, and latter is the one that has Mary in it.

But the essentials about why we have great devotion to Mary are lost to many because they hardly see that great connection between faith in Jesus, and the love of Mary. We all know that we don’t worship Mary, and neither do we adore her as a goddess. Besides, Mary would never want that from us, because only God alone deserves worship and adoration. But why then do we have this great devotion to Mary as Catholics?

In life, there are essentials and less-essentials. And it is found in almost every aspect of life. You name it – from things as mundane as clothing and personal grooming, to things as elaborate as cars and computers, there are the essentials and less-essentials. What is the essential in clothing? Basic covering and protection. Just cover up what needs to be covered up, and you have clothing. You can use bearskins, or fig leafs. But what is less-essentials would be the additions or decorations, or attachments, or adornments if you like. So skirts can have long trains, dresses can have long sleeves, huge collars, lace, sequins, appliqué, one can wear hats, gloves and stockings to complete the look.

In the computer world, what is essential is the CPU, keyboard and monitor. But we all know that you can add so much to this combination, upgrade it, and soup it up and it can just about run the entire household.

In our faith, what is essential? The Word and the Eucharist. Those are non-negotiable. Our essence and our object are intimacy with Jesus and the Holy Trinity. Not Mary. The Word and the Eucharist are what brings Christians together. We should never substitute devotion for the Word and Eucharist. Thus, praying the Rosary during Mass is just bad form. When we are too caught up in devotion, we can lose sight of the essentials and end up missing the forest for the trees.

But why does the Church then have devotions, especially Marian devotion? Simply put, it appeals to the heart, that human side of us, that romantic side of us that makes us human. Devoid of this, we may have the essentials, but in the context of a meal, we may have just the main course, (the meat and potatoes, for those whose diet is largely of a western palate) but what completes a meal, what transforms a meal from being one of basic sustenance to become an experience, is when you have not just the basics, but the appetizers, the entrees, the salads, the wines and the desserts to complement the main course. And a meal is unbalanced with the other things overshadow and take the attention away from the main course.

Same for Marian devotion and any other devotion that is not Word or Eucharist. We need them also because not all of us are deep theologians and liturgists who understand every aspect of theology. I suppose the deep theologians can just receive spiritual nourishment from the basics. But having said that, if one were a deep and honest theologian, one would know that there is a great beauty and spiritual necessity for good Marian devotion too.

I believe that most of us are in need of a spirituality that has a humanism that speaks at least to the romantic side of us. Marian devotion in particular speaks to the side of us that longs to be touched and the feminine in Mary does that in ways that Eucharist does, but perhaps on the level of the cerebral. Mary touches us in the heart.

When we lose sight of Mary, we can end up being cold and wooden. Do you notice that in any Marian apparition in the world, she somehow doesn’t appear to the rich, the well educated and the theologians? Instead, she has always appeared to the poor, the uneducated, the children and those at the bottom. That tells us that if we lose Mary, we may lose our heart. A heart for the poor, a heart for the masses, and a heart that makes us human.

The beatitudes - Jesus' Real Hard Truths

2011-01-30T17:01:00.001-05:00

I received some requests after I preached this homily over the weekend, from some of my parishioners to have it posted on this blog. I rarely do accede to such requests, but I do hold the Beatitudes very closely to my heart as a Disciple of Jesus Christ. As an exception, here is what I preached, and I do hope that this will invite many to re-look at how we have been living out our Christian culture. God bless.

The Hard Truths of Jesus Christ
In most areas of our lives, when we enter into a new culture, a new school, a new workplace, a new social group, there is a need to orientate ourselves. Schools have orientation camps or programmes, and so do many companies. Offices have what is known as ‘office culture’ where one needs to learn the silent and often unwritten ways of doing things, and learn to adapt to the psychology of the place. And often, one does this so that one can adequately ‘fit in’.

Is there a Christian culture? Certainly. Christianity, from the onset of the arrival of the Kingdom of God in Christ, set to establish or rather re-establish a certain culture, a way of living, and a way of loving, which is markedly different from the ways that the world was used to. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us in a summarized form, the Christian Culture. But he knows that it will not be something easily accepted. But it is real hard truth.

Known also as the Sermon on the Mount, “beatitude” is from the Latin beatus meaning blessed. We Catholics have a great tradition to bless all sorts of things, from our rosaries and crucifixes to our homes, cars, to even our animals. Many see being blessed as being loved and favoured by God, and each blessing reminds us of that, and it is. But if we extend this to the beatitudes, we will face a huge problem, because none of the beatitudes seem to be anything like a blessing. At least on the surface.

The Greek for the word ‘blessed’ is makarioi, or makarios, which translates to either ‘congratulations’ or ‘lucky’. It’s a bit like our familiar Gong Xi in Mandarin or Gong Hei in Cantonese that we use freely during the New Year or when something good happens. Imagine the ire evoked if we greet anyone of our friends and relatives with the spirit of the beatitudes – may you have the luck of poverty, the ‘congrats’ for being mournful, ‘may you have the luck’ of being hungry, thirsty and experiencing persecution. Or ‘May you be abused on account of Jesus’. It will be highly unlikely that you will get a smile as a response.

So is there more than meets the eye here? Yes. It is problematic; and it’s hard to understand and almost repulsive to our ears! When we hear the Beatitudes proclaimed, do we feel unsettled or uncomfortable? Do we say to ourselves “this is insane”? That’s a likely response. But if we said “I don’t think I get it, but I’d like to see what Jesus really means”, we are on the cusp of allowing ourselves to understand God’s peculiar language.

First of all, let’s set the record straight. God does not want us to suffer and be miserable in life. If that’s your vision of God, banish it, because that God doesn’t exist. You have created that God, and it’s a false God. You could be guilty, I suppose, of worshipping a false god. But the beatitudes seem to imply that God is like this, and it may seem that God wants us to suffer and be hungry in order to be happy. It’s not that at all; it is far from being the truth. Jesus is really trying to give us the key to happiness that many seek, but simply cannot find because they are looking at the wrong places.

Secondly, what does being poor in spirit mean? It means that you are unsettled in your life, despite all that you have achieved and attained in your life. That’s a poverty of spirit. Let’s just say you have that dream job, attained that title, that double PhD, that fat pay cheque, that fully paid up landed property, and one day, you are looking at all this and are saying to yourself – why am I still not happy? Jesus is saying to you – if you feel that way in your life right now, you are blessed. And ‘lucky’ are you when you reach that point in life, because you will begin to realize that true happiness lies in things beyond the material, beyond the possessing and beyond the achieving, it’s found ironically, not in the obtaining of all that, but in the letting go of all that. You have come to the all important second half of life. That they are not yours to possess and hoard is something that the beatitudes are trying to teach us. And that is a hard truth.

Thirdly, ‘lucky’ are you also when you see the virtue in being lowly and small. The language of the world speaks totally against this. The name of the game in just about every field is to rule and be on top, to thumb others down, to shut out the voice of the opposition. That is not Hard Truth. In fact, it is hardly true. In fact, tomes are written about these ‘methods’, and those methods do not the test of time stand.

But Jesus is saying that these ways are not the ways to true blessedness, and in fact, the many generations of people who have been despots and political bullies have shown that they have been insecure and were constantly on the lookout for those who shook their dominance. And some even openly say that they need to demolish their opponents.

You want lasting happiness? You want happiness perdures; happiness that is secure? It’s not up there in the winners’ circle. And if you know this, you will be happy because you are in the humble state, the earthy state, the state of the humus, from where ‘humility’ gets its root. That is hard truth.

Lucky are you when you are pure in heart. Too many of us have only one definition of purity, and that is related to sexual purity. It is just one of the many forms of purity. But sexual purity seems to be the only kind that we can relate to because that’s the only category that many of us think in. But purity is also being unadulterated, unmixed, clear and with nothing hidden. If that is the case, then purity must go beyond just the sexual. You want happiness in you life? Then attain a purity, a state of being unmixed, and clear in all areas of your life. Be focused; be unsullied – in your business dealings, in your relationship with your children and your spouses, in your reasons for doing anything in life. If you are clear of your intentions, not bluffing yourselves or others, and refuse to be deceived by impure motivations, you will see God working clearly in your life. You have a point of reference that is clear and purposeful. And that is another hard truth.

Reflecting on the Beatitudes in this way gives us a point of entry into the mystery of God’s language. Try to do it for each of the other beatitudes. It’s not impossible, but I’d admit that it isn’t easy and it can be dangerous. It is dangerous because if we are serious about it, it will shake us from our complacency of our secure platforms that we have built in our lives.

It requires a certain willingness to see life from another side; another angle. But when you do, I think you would be doing what the prophet Zephaniah told the people to do – you will be seeking integrity, and seeking humility. You will be earthy people in touch with your true roots. And our true roots are in God. It doesn’t take a whole lot of intelligence to do this. In fact, too much of intelligence becomes a stumbling block to entering into the key. Even St Paul says it to the Corinthians – it’s not the influential, not the noble, and not those wise in the ordinary sense of the word that respond appropriately, but those who are willing to be weak.

But none of us are willing to be weak. It doesn’t feel good to be weak, but that’s the whole spirit of the beatitudes – a willingness on our part to not be slaves to our feelings and to not let our feelings determine our morality, our choices in life, and our paths towards happiness. That’s the spirit of the Beatitudes, possible only in the spirit of Jesus.

This then, is the corporate Christian culture that we need to appreciate over and over again. Some of us have never seen it this way. May our eyes be opened to usher in a new light. And that is a Hard Truth.

I hope people don't misunderstand me - I am not saying that it's wrong to read about other peoples’ definition of Hard Truths. But it would be a travesty of our Christian identity if we only read those, and can speak about life in those categories, and have never before read the words of Jesus, who is after all, the way, the (real hard) TRUTH, and the life.

Formation of the Faith of our flock

2011-01-23T16:55:00.001-05:00

I was having a discussion with my Parish Priest just last week about some of the challenges that we face as priests in a parish of about 6000 parishioners. What brought that on was my sharing of how some couples seem to take levity with so many aspects of marriage and married life, ending up in a lot of problematic knots that need untying later on in life. And the lament that I made was that if couples were adequately prepared for married life as God looks at marriage, these things would not be happening. It made me wonder whether as church, we have been lacking in our formation of the faith of our flock, resulting in a generation of Catholics who are sorely lacking in the fundamentals of the faith, and the fundamentals of life itself.

It is a problem that seems to be circular, and I am left wondering if there is a solution in sight.

1. The general populations of Catholics seem to be inadequately formed in their faith, and there are large numbers who come to simply fulfill Mass obligations.
2. When we priests see a lack of depth in their faith, we try to offer formation sessions, talks, discussions, organize forums, write articles, blogs (like this one), to do what we can to address the problem.
3. The people who need to be formed or re-formed, which are our target audience, are not responding to this offer. Instead, it is often the formed Catholics, those who are not ‘obligation-fulfilling’ Catholics, who are attending the sessions and talks, and we do see quite often, the same faces at various talks and workshops. (This is not a complaint, though).
4. This leads us back to square one, where the ill-formed Catholics are seen at Mass attendance, where announcements are made ad nauseam for them to go to prayer meets, formation sessions, but with little take up.

Some of us do realize that the problem may go a bit further back, to the Catechism classes of our youth. The problem is that the fundamentals may be taught there, but it is the follow up of home formation from the parents that are lacking. Few parents are willing to spend time with their children to pray with them, share the faith with them, explain church teachings to them, and discuss struggles with the faith with them. But the irony is that parents will do all that they can to hire tutors for academic subjects, enrichment classes, and music and ballet classes.

Again, it is not that these are not good. But is there adequate proportion given to the spiritual as compared to the secular and academic? Many, I suspect, are leaving God-talk to the church catechists who do this for 90 minutes (at best) a week and feel that they have done their job as Catholic parents. This would be a travesty of Catholic upbringing.

Perhaps it is these very parents who need to be re-formed in their faith and the richness that it gives them. But when these sessions are offered to them, they are the ones who don’t turn up. And we end up in the circle again.

At one of our recent monthly Priests’ Recollections, it was bemoaned how society has changed so much. In the past, God (which includes things pertaining to Church and the spiritual life) was placed at the centre of one’s world, and everything else like work, family, leisure, recreation, and education revolved around it. They were like spokes radiating out from a properly balanced wheel. Now, God is simply one of the spokes (if at all), and it is not even clear what the centre of the wheel is. It is thus understandable why some people can even question the moral authority of the Church to recommend guiding rules for all to follow and to order our lives.

How do we make our people hunger for God? Mass preaching is only limited to at best 15 minutes a week, and we can only cover about 3 points with little depth. Besides, I lament with so many preachers that our flock often listens with glazed eyes and distanced visages during those 15 minutes, so that is another stumbling block.

Too many Catholics see God as a fireman – one whom we need to call when there is fire raging in our lives. How do we get them to see that God is on fire for love of them? Perhaps I may get some ideas and comments this week that will help.

When the ceremony can overshadow the reality

2011-01-16T16:33:00.000-05:00

I encountered a rather disturbing episode this weekend when I was giving a session to prepare parents and godparents for the celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism for infants in my parish. In my conversation with the parents and godparents, it was apparent how godparents may be chosen with little emphasis on their ability to pass on the faith.

The criterion for the choice of godparents seems to be based on rapport and friendship these days, rather than on the faith quality of the godparents. When the faith life of the godparents is not the chief criterion that the choice of godparent/s is based on, the role of godparenting becomes largely compromised, reducing it to being present at a ceremony and some photo-taking sessions, and perhaps a yearly visit to the godchild at festive occasions, making the ‘god’ prefix somewhat superfluous.

How do we ascertain the faith life of godparents, or anyone for that matter? A few simple questions usually can help to shed some light. It may not be foolproof, but it can be an indication. What is a sacrament? How many are there? Is baptism a sacrament? How many days of obligation are there in the Church calendar? Is a Catholic a Christian? Who are the four evangelists? Was St Paul one of the 12 apostles? Have you visited an adoration room before? Is Jesus really present in the Eucharist, or is it just symbolic? Is the Sacrament of Reconciliation something that you encounter on a regular basis?

Of course, one may have the perfect answers to these simple questions, and it may not mean that the faith life of the person is in good order, but it is some indication of some basics.

The Church has good reason for having godparents, because they assist the parents in forming the faith of the children. As the saying so rightly puts it, it takes a village to raise a child. The ‘village’ in this case is the represented by the godparent who should be chosen carefully from among those in the ‘village’ who are stalwarts of faith, courageous and steadfast believers of Christ, and shining examples of Christian living. The more a Catholic interacts with the community in a very involved way, the more he or she will know of the existence of such people in the community in which he or she lives in.

But there seems to be a great reluctance to be involved and active in the Catholic community by many Catholics. I do know that there is a lot of pressure and expectations of our working life, and to purposefully take one evening out a week to attend neighbourhood prayer meetings and get involved in the life of the community outside of Mass does entail a sacrifice. And here is the rub – if we keep citing work as a reason that we don’t know our community, then we will find it very difficult to identify faith heroes in our neighbourhoods who can become strong faith role models for our children to be godparents. And so, we will end up just asking our relatives or friends, either for the sake of nostalgia or because we don’t know anyone else. If their faith life were shining and sound, it would be wonderful. But if they cannot even answer simple and basic questions about the faith, we may end up compromising the faith development of our children.

When this happens, we will possibly end up reducing something deep and wonderful like a Sacrament of Baptism into merely a Kodak moment, and get all caught up in a rite, than the reality that it presents to us for life.

When wealth can blind

2011-01-09T16:58:00.000-05:00

There is principally nothing wrong with money or wealth per se. It can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing. But it is actually neutral. Just like temper. It can make us realize our need to control our emotions and not let them get the better of us, or we can let it control us, where we can end up abusing those around us in various ways.

Is there a prosperity gospel? There could well be, but it certainly was not one that was preached by Jesus Christ, and it certainly was not written by any of the four evangelists. Jesus’ good news, or gospel, was one that in fact dared to broach the necessity of facing poverty in our lives in a way that makes no sense to our drive for ego-fulfilling ambition, success and accumulation. Jesus knew that the only way to die well was to do it without holding on to anything, so that we can fully hold on to the love and mercy of God. Anyone looking at the beatitudes of Christ would be hard pressed to find within those pithy statements a message of wealth and accumulated assets and success.

What can wealth blind us to? We only need to look at the story of the rich man (Dives, in the Latin Vulgate) and Lazarus, found in Luke 16:19-31. Here we see an imagery of what riches can blind us to. In that story, Dives was blinded to the very presence and person of Lazarus who was languishing at the gate of his house. Yet, we are told that it was after he died that he saw Lazarus ‘far off’, in the bosom of Abraham. Apparently, there seems to be a sudden ability to see so well after death, the very things that were right in front of our eyes when we were alive. Dives couldn’t see Lazarus when he was alive, with him lying at his gate, but when death came, it seemed that his eyes were open enough to see him ‘far off’. It must mean that death, often called the great leveler, also gives us the ability to see not just others, but ourselves as we truly are, and as others truly are as well. In this life, we play all sorts of games where we often hide so much.

If wealth blinds, does this mean then that poverty gives one 6/6 (or 20/20) vision? Not necessarily. There are many people in dire poverty who are living just as unenlightened lives, who are just as blind or who are have ill intentions of skimming the plenty from those who have more than they in immoral and illegal ways, or who have revenge as their agenda in life. Much as it may not be right to preach a gospel of prosperity, it would be just as naïve to preach a gospel of living in abject poverty thinking that just by a physical and material relinquishing, we will automatically come closer to Christ.

The Social Teachings of our rich Catholic history, all the way from the Fathers of the Church to current times, have extolled the virtue of a preferential option for the poor. When we develop an option for the poor, it does what an angioplasty does for the arteries – it makes our blood flow better to our heart, bringing health and vitality to the weakened heart, and it makes compassion for Christ in the poor a compelling, and almost a besetting act. Somehow, the opposite happens when all our focus is honed in to amassing our personal wealth and hoarding our stash. That is indeed the crux of the problem – when our thirst for wealth makes us covetous. That border between the two (amassing personal wealth and being covetous) is so fine that it is often imperceptible, and it is often based on the fallacy that there is never enough, and more is always better.

Jesus preached against covetousness in Luke 12:13-21. Here, Jesus doesn’t condemn riches. What he does is denounce and berate the self-preserving and self-centeredness that is found in each one of us. Notice that verse 13 begins with a man asking Jesus to tell his brother to divide the family inheritance with him. The response from Jesus could well have been very different if he had asked Jesus to get his brother to share the family inheritance with the poor.

If our wealth has blinded us from seeing the various Lazarus’s at our gates, perhaps what we need to do is to check often enough who may be lying there. And if we don’t see anyone there, we may in fact be lying to ourselves.

The difference between doing something, and doing it with love

2011-01-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

One of the songs that I like to have played during the Marriage Encounter weekends is “Love Changes Everything” – not the 1987 version by Climie Fisher, but the one from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Aspects of Love. As the title suggests, so too do we believe as Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, that love does change everything. However, the huge problem comes about when we have such different definitions of love and what we think constitutes love. When it is subjective (and most of the time it is), it is our own interpretations of love (and what constitutes loving) that gets us, and our overtures of love, into all sorts of messes. I was singing the words of this tune in our kitchen last week and Jenny, our parish cook, a lovely non-Christian who has worked here for many years, looked at me with great suspicion and said, “I don’t believe you”. She added, “so many people have been hurt and injured by love”.

Actually, she cannot be blamed for being cynical about this statement. She can be included amongst the millions and millions who have either seen people hurting others by love, or perhaps have themselves been hurt by love. So how can we purport to believe that “love changes everything”? By looking at the truest and deepest definition of love.

Where do we find this? Where is the prototype of love? Who gives us the best example? Simply put – Jesus Christ himself.

“A new commandment I give to you – love one another as I have loved you” is the statement that makes Jesus THE definition of love, as he IS the giver of life and love. His is the Gold Standard of love. But we take this remarkable statement of Christ so lightly that it is hardly ever pondered over when we make our decisions and choice of actions in life. “Do this in memory of me” then makes very deep sense because we will love as Jesus loved, making him real and present to everyone we encounter.

There are many things that we do as Church. Our outreach to the poor, our works of mercy, our liturgical prayers and devotions, and the way that we share of what we have with those who have not. But at the heart of it, are we doing it with a conscious choice to love?

I am sure that a lot of us do give in various ways, but if at that very instance that we put our hands into our wallets or purses, consciously do become aware that this action needs to be done with a deliberate choice to love, I am sure that we will be more generous, less thinking of ourselves; less about what we will forgo and think more of the recipient as the receiver of love. If not, he or she will only be the recipient of money. And our giving action can be just a sign to them to leave us alone.

The same goes for the way that we worship as a community. Why do most of the faces that we see at Masses lack a conviction that we are indeed ‘glorifying’ God when we say “glory to God in the highest”? Perhaps it is because there is little love in our words. Simply put, we don’t love God.

Most of us fear him, and because we can only fear him, we will worship him because we are told to, and not because we show him that we are loving him by our worship. In many minds of Catholics, I won’t be surprised if God is some kind of ogre. It’s a very toxic image of God that we may have, and due to this, we worship in dread, we adore with a grudge, we drag our feet to Mass and we cannot find it in our hearts to love such a being.

I have close to 10 years of hearing confessions under my belt. But in these 10 years, I have yet to hear anyone admit with a humility “Father, I realize that I don’t love God. And because I don’t love God, I don’t love my neighbour as well, and I don’t love myself adequately”. I believe that when we can come to this realization, we would have come to what I’d call the cusp of a true encounter of our basal selfishness, which will very likely lead to a true encounter with God – the God of love.

And when we do, we will be convinced that love does change everything.

Our Bucket List

2010-12-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

I just watched a rather interesting movie called “The Bucket List”, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. I know it is a rather old movie, made in 2007, but I hardly have many opportunities to watch movies when they are released. It’s one of those things that I wish I had time for, but my days off seem to be peppered with so many other things to accomplish.

The story revolves around two people (the characters played by Nicholson and Freeman) and how they end up sharing the same hospital room to undergo intensive chemotherapy for their cancer. A friendship develops between them and they both find out that their days are numbered. The rest of the story involves their ‘bucket list’ of things to do, and places to visit before they ‘kick-the-bucket’, thus the title. It’s one of those ‘feel good’ movies, where I suppose the intention of the director is to make the viewers walk out of the cinema hall with a new zeal to face and tackle the vicissitudes and challenges of daily living.

It would not be so bad an idea if we write our own bucket list as well, even though we may be alive and well, without the threat of an end of our lives anywhere in sight. What would this bucket list contain?

If we are idealistic and really hopeful, I am sure that it would include visiting many places that we would only read about or visit through the world of the television or the Internet. But it would be sad if the list were only full of physical places and nothing to do at all with visiting hearts and touching them as well.

What would we use as our gauge? The Wonders of the World? The Eyewitness Travel guides? Maybe the Michelin Guide to the Restaurants of the World. If money were no object, these may well be the lists that would influence our choices. But would they bring us to any sense of real fulfillment and achievement when we finally do lie on our deathbed?

From time to time, it would be good if we revisit Matthew 25. I daresay that it will bring us to places far more important and impactful than any of the above guides may recommend, because it speaks of visiting not places but lives.

Perhaps another gauge that will guide our list is to ask ourselves what our dearest and nearest will be thankful for to us when we are at our life’s end. Will our employees thank us for teaching them greed and how to be power hungry, or will they thank us for imparting honesty and integrity in the workplace? Will our spouses thank us for taking us around the world and to fine restaurants or will they thank us for not taking them for granted? Will our children thank us for giving them a wealthy family to belong to, or do they have a sense to know that true wealth comes because dad and mum have imparted to them a great love for God and how to do his will?

The New Year is just round the corner, and lots of people will be making resolutions. If you are one of those who do take part in this ritual, perhaps after reading this blog entry, you will think a bit deeper, reach a bit further, and love with a larger heart.

One of the best lines of the movie comes at the beginning and at the end, when the narrator reminds us how to die with closed eyes but an open heart.

May you have a blessed, holy and grace-filled 2011.

The mercy of the messy first Christmas

2010-12-19T16:59:00.000-05:00

Throughout the world, in just about every Church ground, or near the Sanctuary area around Christmas time, there will be a manger scene or Christmas crib on display. Some are life-size, some in miniature. They will inevitably feature the images of the holy couple Joseph and Mary, some shepherds, and the obligatory animals in the form of oxen or sheep. The prime spot of attention will undoubtedly be a tiny baby lying on some straw. Strangely, this baby is hardly ever in the proper scale of how a newborn should be, in relation to the scale of the images of his parents, Joseph and Mary. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look carefully the next time you see the crib. The baby is always enormously out of proportion. I find this to be a pity, because if the baby is really in proportion to the size of the other figures, it will really bring home the point of how vulnerable God made himself through the incarnation.

Whether the figure of Jesus is out of proportion or not, the sentiment when viewing the crib, the feeling that sweeps over one’s heart, is often “look at the poor baby Jesus”. Yes, his surroundings are indeed poor and barren – after all, mangers are feeding areas for farm animals, and they would hardly be the place considered sanitized enough to be a place to give birth to a child. These areas must be habitats of bacteria and are places that are fit only to give birth to animals at best.

What should strike us at the heart about Christmas and the Christmas Crib is not a “poor Jesus” sentiment, but rather that God looked on at humanity and saw the way we needed to be saved and said “you poor people”, causing him to take on our frail and mortal human nature to show us how to truly be human.

That crib, that state of poverty, that visual diorama of unavailability and being closed for anything divine - is representative of our hearts and minds. We are in dire need of God’s entry point to give us a new direction in life apart from ourselves, and when we can’t see that, we miss the point of each Christmas Crib. When sentimentality is all we have when viewing the Crib, we are blinded to the fact that the Crib is in fact the state of our world and our lives. And the wonderful news about Christmas is that no place is too foreign, too dirty, too unhygienic, too dark, too dank and too smelly for God to enter in.

A priest once said so wisely at Christmas Mass that in the incarnation, God has changed a messy world into a mercy world. He didn’t wait for it to become perfect and sanitized before coming. In fact, it was because it was that messy that he came. But that’s not us, is it? We will only wait for something to be perfect before moving, wait until someone deserves forgiveness before we offer it, and wait for love to be appreciated before giving our hearts. Christmas (and the Paschal mystery) shows us how we constantly miss the point.

And for that, we have to be truly grateful at Christmas Eucharist. May all my weekly readers have a blessed and transformed Christmas.

God love you all.

2010-12-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

This blog will be on a hiatus for two weeks.

Real Presence on this side of the Eucharist

2010-11-28T17:00:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a meal at a café when I noticed a young couple seated at the table next to me. What made me take notice of them was the fact that for the entire duration of their meal, they hardly spoke to each other, but were furiously tapping away on their individual ‘smart’ phones, which is getting very common nowadays. What I saw made me lament silently – with the advent of modes of communication that are so advanced, where even phones can be given the title ‘smart’, we seem to be facing a deplorable lack of the real ability to communicate when we are in the presence of another, even when seated right in front of another person.

In the Catholic Church, we have always believed that Christ is truly present in the consecrated species of bread and wine. It is given the term ‘real presence’. Reserved in Monstrances around the world in chapels and adoration rooms, this real presence of Christ is on grand display for us to spend time with the Lord, to communicate with him, and for him to communicate with us.

His real presence invites us, on this side of the Eucharist, to ultimately be truly and really present to Him. This is needed, more and more these days, for various reasons, the chief one being that it prepares us for our ultimate and highest calling in life – to be eventually present to God in heaven, ‘face to face’. The more we hold this mystery and purposefully make the effort to spend quality time with the Lord in Eucharistic adoration, the more we ready our hearts for that real, present and endless encounter.

The ability to be present is being constantly compromised, and I daresay, threatened. Our minds just cannot seem to stay long on being present, but seek to constantly flit from thought to thought, image to image, thrill to thrill, and resists to be abiding in a presence, in the present. Our hearts truly are restless, till they rest in God, as St Augustine said.

Yet, we are still not convinced, and allow our hearts to continue to be tickled and teased, even when in front of the Blessed Sacrament. We would wish that with all the communication devices available, we would somehow find it easier to communicate with one another, and be more present to one another, but ironically, we are dumbing down in our ability to do so.

Does it mean that the solution is to completely do away with all this technology and turn back the clock of our intellectual advancement? Is the removal of a distraction, the banning of any one thing an answer that will make us communicate better? If so, would it not be tantamount to removal of the ability to sin, so that we are always living in a state of grace?

Underlying all overtures of love is the fundamental belief that love must be a decision, as the Marriage Encounter and Engagement Encounter movements have reiterated since their existence. In this short phrase lies the crux of love - that it is a decision. So is communication a decision. Removal of our gadgets and gizmos that are called communication devices is not a solution to this problem if our hearts are not first going to make communication a decision.

As I shared these thoughts with a parishioner, he sighed and said, “those were the days when there were no mobile phones, no pagers, no Internet, and we had to make the effort to either visit or write letters to communicate”. He feels that the advent of these communication devices is a bane to our human development.

I feel differently. In fact, when a decision to put down that phone is made, when we turn off the computer and sit down to talk, it makes that effort even more valuable as a deliberate act of love now because when that happens, it is not a matter of having ‘no choice’, but rather, ‘lots of choices’, making the choice to love a much higher value than before.

And while we develop our real presence before others, we must also allow ourselves to be fully present to God in a decided manner, especially before the Eucharist, so that our real presence meets the Real Presence, causing real presence on both sides of the Eucharist.

Where real strength lies

2010-11-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

The phrase “be strong” are familiar words said at funeral wake visits, usually to the grieving members of the deceased family, who are in the darkness of the reality of being separated from their loved one.

Is this phrase meant to discourage the bereaved from shedding tears of sadness in public? If so, then we might as well ask that the bereaved to stop being human, because that is what is actually being advised. Lying deep in the heart of our humanity is the gift of emotional expression that allows one to be in touch with hurt, disappointment, sadness and grief. But it seems that allowing that to happen is something that is largely frowned upon, and it is deemed much more appropriate to keep up an appearance of stoicism, and present a front that is unmoved, almost statue-like.

Spiritual master and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has this to say about crying: the young man who cannot cry is a savage, and the old man who cannot laugh is a fool. A trove of wisdom lies there. Grief work is something that has long been seen as not only good, but also necessary. When one buries what hurts, what is unhealed and what requires mending, one only really postpones a real healing and true growth. But that is, sadly, the way a large majority of people seem to operate in the face of disappointment, pains, suffering and failure.

That must be the reason why when one is brought to the precipice of the ultimate end of life, when one is faced with the demise of a loved one, a family member, a life-partner, many have ill-advised the bereaved one to ‘be strong’ and not shed a tear. The question remains - Is this really strength? Or is this faux strength? Much closer to the latter, I suspect, because we do know that when there is no need to face a sea of people, when the door is closed, when one is alone and in touch with one’s raw emotions, the real shows itself, and we need to grieve.

Jesus must have been trying address this in his beatitude where he said “blessed are those who weep; they shall be comforted”. What do many of us try to do when we need comforting? We do anything but weep. It’s called escapism. Some plunge themselves into their work, many take to drink, gambling or drugs, and to the delight of marketers, many also take to retail therapy, which has hardly any long-term effects, save for the obscene interest rates that credit card companies slap on to the unsuspecting.

But when we really know how to weep, and learn how to ‘send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears’, that is when true healing can come, and where we will really find comfort and balm for the soul.

When Jesus preached the beatitudes, he was embarking on his journey, which would eventually take him to the Cross, where he would be facing what would eventually be known as the Paschal mystery. And it is only in the light of the Paschal mystery, with its light thrown back on his teachings that we can make any sense of any of the beatitudes of Jesus. And for this particular beatitude on the blessedness of weeping, from and through which one can find comfort, it is no wonder that anyone with no sound appreciation of the Paschal mystery can only end up advising one to ‘be strong’ and not see the need to surrender one’s tears, but to instead hide behind a visage that has only gossamer strength.

So, should we or shouldn’t we say ‘be strong’ when giving solace to those in pain? Perhaps we should only choose to say it to someone who knows what the Paschal mystery is, and to only be strong in clinging on to the promises of Christ; strong in faith. And if tears are shed as a result of this, and emotions exposed to all, that would really be a show of strength.

Anger’s power

2010-11-14T17:02:00.000-05:00

In many of the confessions that I have heard, one of the most common problems that people encounter is anger, or misdirected negative energies. Quite often, the remark that ‘so-and-so made me angry’ is made, almost justifying or exonerating one’s culpability. What the hidden statement means is that I wouldn’t have sinned if I was not pushed to do it.

Right off the bat, I’d like to say that anger itself is not a sin. Anger is energy, much like passion is energy. In fact, just saying that wrath or anger is one of the seven classical deadly sins, and from that, extrapolating that it is a ‘mortal’ sin would really be painting with an extremely broad brush. If anger is a sin, then Jesus cannot be said to be sinless as it is clearly stated that he was angry because the moneychangers had turned his father’s house into a market place, and that he drove them out with a lash of cords. Some would justify it by using the term “holy anger”.

Technically, we don’t find the word ‘anger’ in any of the passages of the four evangelists that describe this scene of Jesus and the cleansing of the temple. At most, we find the phrase ‘he drove them out’, or something similar. Certainly, one can argue that it is rather difficult to drive someone out of a place without a ‘fire in the belly’, and so, the conclusion is likely that Jesus was angry. In another passage, in Mark 11, Jesus curses the barren fig tree. I’d say that this is a far more direct and clear evidence of anger as one can hardly curse with a nary a hint of anger.

What can be said with a degree of certainty is that when we see a display of anger by Jesus in Scripture, it usually has to do with some evidence of an injustice. It is his passion for justice, notably God’s justice, to be done that results in his display of anger. This must give us an indication that we too should hunger for God’s justice to be carried out in this world, and that we need to be instrumental for it to happen.

We have all experienced anger in many of its forms. Some of us brood and are quiet when we are angry, some of us need to vent when we are vexed. Those living in the more enlightened stratosphere claim to be able to sublimate their anger. We don’t seem to need to learn how to be angry. Even an infant is said to display a certain ‘anger’ when deprived of milk when his belly cries for nourishment by crying with an uncanny ability to rouse even the heaviest of sleepers.

When I counsel penitents about anger, about what it is, and about what it isn’t, I try to get them to see that it is far more important to identify two things – what the anger was triggered by, and what it triggered off (meaning, the effects it had on our community). Being able to identify the first would help one to keep anger at bay when the warning signs appear on the horizon. And it could be a whole host of different things that initiate anger or worse, a hurtful rage.

Pondering on what anger triggers off is an invitation to see the effects our anger has on ourselves and the community or the body of Christ. The extreme end of this would be causing hurt, abuse, and even killing of a life. Most of the time, thankfully, the body of Christ is not so badly maimed, but it is definitely hurt, impaired and even sullied to a certain degree. It is when we are able to see the kind of wreckage left behind in the wake of our anger that we will slowly begin to see the wisdom of keeping anger in check.

One of the easiest things to do when confronted with a sin is to push the blame elsewhere. We only have to turn to chapter 3 of Genesis to see that this blame game is really the oldest game in our human history. And it is played out repeatedly in the course of history. There is an original sinfulness here that all of us share, because it makes our culpability so much lighter when we say ‘so-and-so’ made me angry. The other party would not be able to make us angry if we had not first allowed this kind of power to be given to him or her. In a similar way, no one can make one irritated if one is not irritable in the first place.

At the heart of an uncontrolled display of fury and rage is the loss of something deep within us. What we have lost in those moments are not so much our control and our precious face, but rather our secure stand that we are deeply loved by God who tells us repeatedly that it is alright even when things may turn nasty, when people misunderstand us, or when things don’t go our way. We have lost not so much our temper, but rather, our firm grip on God’s loving hands. And it wouldn’t help much if our cause for such displays of misdirected energies were not so much an upholding of God’s justice, but to protect or promote our own selves.

And when we humbly admit to those moments of stupidity, especially within the Sacrament of Reconciliation, we are placed back into God’s firm hold of love once more.

Living and enjoying the present

2010-11-07T16:59:00.001-05:00

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray the Lord’s Prayer, he made it clear that when asking God to provide for our needs, in giving us bread, he did not say ‘give us always an over abundance; a never-ceasing flow; a copious excess of bread’, but limited it instead to a day’s portion. Some of us may have a problem with this. After all, isn’t he a God of abundance? He isn’t known to scrimp on goodness and grace, is he? Wasn’t that made clear when he fed the 5000 hungry hillside folk with an abundance that gave bountiful leftovers of twelve baskets full? One wonders what they did with those scraps. Yet, when he taught the Lord’s Prayer, he tells us to ask that God ‘give us today our daily bread’.

Why do we think that there is never enough? Largely because we are fearful and discontented. And it cuts across just about every level of our needs and wants. We fear that there is not enough food, not enough supplies, not enough money, not enough resources, not enough time, and the fear that grips us at our foundations, is the fear that there is never enough love. It is perhaps this innate fear that feeds a greed that is found alongside this fear that causes us to want to store and to hoard, be stingy and selfish, and look out for so many ways to preserve ourselves. This fear narrows our borders and draws distinctions as to where so many of our resources can and should be shared.

In teaching us to pray that God give us a daily portion of what we need, Jesus is not teaching us that God is a scrimpy giver. Jesus is teaching us something that so many of us have yet to learn due to our fear, which feeds our greed and neediness. We are taught contentment and how to live in the present. Don’t ask for too much right now. There is no need to store and to hoard. There are no need to build silos and storehouses.

In a recent random survey, a question was asked about which day of the week was seen as the worse day and why? The people who carried out the survey expected Monday to be the worst, as we know of many people who profess to hate Mondays. Even the popular US music group from the 80s, the Bangles, wrote a hit-song about Manic Monday. Mondays are generally known to be bleak, and the office email boxes are often jammed with enquiries requiring immediate replies, and the faces in the office and buses and trains are not the cheeriest. So, it was generally expected that Monday was going to be every respondent’s choice of the worse day. Or so it was thought.

The surprising thing about the answer was that it was not Monday. It was Sunday. And the reason behind the choice was even more telling, and more surprising. No, it had nothing to do with the fact that they felt that they had to go to Church on Sunday. It was not a religion-based survey. Many of the respondents felt that Sunday was the worst day of the week because they were dreading that Monday was just one day away, and all that they had in terms of leisure, rest, recreation, and a generally relaxing time with loved ones and friends was slipping away as Monday approaches. They could not enjoy the moment as it was presented to them.

There is a much deeper problem than what appears at the surface. In a certain hidden way, it shows that many of us have a great difficulty in being present and living in the present, about being contented, and as such, have a self-inflicted air of pessimistic gloominess about us. The Spiritual Fathers have always been advocates of living in the present, being present to the present, and this wisdom is found not only in the Christian tradition, but also in the other eastern religions like Zen Buddhism and Islamic Sufism. The awareness spiritual exercises that are found in many religions point to the need to be tuned-in to the present.

To just ask God for a day’s portion of what we need to get by for the day trains us not to be greedy, and not to live in fear. It also trains us to live in the present, and not project too far into the future. When we develop allergies to living in the present, when we cast our thoughts and fears into the future or carry them from the past, we will either live in fear or in regret, causing us innumerable neuroses. We will not want to forgive because the one who caused us anguish may hurt us in the future. We will not want to let go of a hurt, because we are carrying with us something akin to a huge baggage from the past, even though it may have been decades ago that we were hurt. We may not wish to be generous and deplete ourselves (and be blessedly poor, ref the beatitudes) because the future looks bleak and there are clouds looming on the horizon.

Is this kind of spirituality advocating a ‘live-for-today; to-hell-with-tomorrow’ mentality? Certainly not. Jesus doesn’t want us to be like the grasshopper in the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. But if our entire life and work ethic is based on the fear that there is never enough, it will lead to a constriction of a generously pumping heart in not just individuals but also large corporations and countries, where resources will not be shared simply because of a fear that is often irrational or worse, simply protective of oneself.

When the Hebrew people were freed from the slavery of the Egyptians in their 40-year exodus in the desert, they were fed with manna from heaven. Apart from it appearing like hoarfrost, they were told that it would not keep for more than a day. Isn’t that telling us that God’s providence though wonderful and good, needs to be received with an attitude that decries any hoarding, and to be contented with the present?

Perhaps now, knowing this, it should spur us to being more aware of the need to be present when we say “give us today our daily bread”, and not be too worried that there may not be enough for tomorrow.

Saints and their role in our lives

2010-10-31T17:52:00.000-04:00

There’s a certain maturity that is required of everything in life. Just look at nature, and you will see this evidence in abundance. It is only when seeds sprout, germinate, grow, develop and flower will we see the possibility of the fruit that gives new life. Cut a tree prematurely, and you will not see it grow, and not see it reach the necessary maturity to bear fruit.

Insects and animals all have the same pattern. There is a certain requirement for a maturity to develop, not so much for itself, but for the continuation of the species.

What is our ultimate aim in life? To work? To have a family? To be educated? Yes, these are good in themselves, but they don’t last eternally. There’s something that does last for eternity, and that is our life in God. We as baptized children of God have as our aim, to develop, grow and mature this relationship that we have with God. Every saint that is in heaven now, enjoying the beatific vision of God has reached maturity in his or her relationship with God. While we are on the way there in this life, the growth process is not yet where it should be. Our personal brokenness somehow stifles and prevents a full maturity and fruition of our lives.

Canonized saints have their feast days celebrated in the liturgical calendar year, but to be sure, there are many, many more saints than there are days in a calendar year. So, on this day, the church revels in the belief that these people are in that eternal embrace of God, and are not uncomfortable about it.

That’s what being in heaven can be described as. We all long for love in some ways, and the highest expression of love is when we are enfolded in the embrace of God who is love. Yes, we all long for that, but at the same time, we know that there could well be a lot of discomfort and uneasiness when we are embraced by the all-loving God. It’s just like some children who experience this embrace by loving parents or grandparents. Some of them squirm and fidget, feeling all so awkward and uncomfortable. Somehow, they know it’s a good thing, but at the same time, they know they feel unworthy of this grand display of love, and they want out. Some may feel that it’s not cool.

Couples having been married for years may also, strangely, have the same experience. Much as they want to be embraced in an unconditional love by the spouse, they know that somehow, it’s not complete even in this world. They know that somehow, the irony of love is that in this world, there are some loves that will always be left unfulfilled. Some feel unworthy, and some, because of a personal contribution to a friction in the relationship, know that this physical embrace is not as pure as it should be.

What is this discomfort? It is sin. It’s our inability to live maturely and respond maturely to the love that is being given, and we have to work this out before entering heaven’s eternal embrace. The saints who are in heaven have worked it out and purified this. Some in this life, and others (and this probably is the majority) in the purification of purgatory. But however the purification, the saints are now completely comfortable and no longer struggling in God’s eternal embrace. There is a complete giving and complete receiving of that love, which is God’s plan for love.

Why we need to celebrate All Saints’ Day is because we need to know for a fact that there are many whose lives bear testimony to living out love to its fullest. We need heroes who we can model after, and we need to know that there is a goal, a destination, a fulfilling and yes, a fruiting which many now are inside of, and this is where we are all hoping for ourselves too.

We need to remember that heaven is a reality, and that there are multitudes that are already in that mature relationship with God. The saints are the seeds that have been sown, germinated, grown, flowered and fruited, and leave us all a bit of their fruitfulness and shade so that we too can do the same for our lives and the lives of others. In them, we have models to teach us that not only is this kind of loving possible, but that it is also absolutely necessary.

The attitude of gratitude

2010-10-24T17:55:00.000-04:00

In her column in yesterday’s national paper, the daughter of the Minister Mentor of our island republic of Singapore gave a timely reminder, very obviously in the light of her mother’s recent demise, to be thankful and grateful to many people who are often behind the scenes of the events of our lives.

In her article she went on at length to name and described some of the ways in which many other political figures helped to shape the way that Singapore has turned out. Some of the names she mentioned were lesser known, but they obviously were featured in the recesses of her memory. After reading her article, and closing the paper, I did feel something was amiss. Perhaps it was never her intention, but she did leave out an obvious group of people, and those are the people who are our adversaries in life.

It doesn’t take a lot of civility and good upbringing to be thankful in life for the people who have positively shaped our thinking and character. Teachers, life-trainers and caregivers come to mind. But I have come to realize that if in our lives, we only thank those who are contributors in a positive way, we may only become grateful when things go our way, or when we encounter obvious blessings, or when we are successful. Does this mean then that Ms Lee was wrong? Not really. What it means is that perhaps the depth and meaning of the Cross in life is something that has never really been pondered by not just Ms Lee, but by many who have yet to truly know Christ and how he saves.

To run to the Cross, and to seek out pain and suffering in life is not what being a Christian is all about. That’s neurosis. But to acknowledge one’s crosses in life, and to not hate them, not blame anyone for them, not victimizing them, and not locking them up, is maturity. It’s living wide. Catholics have long been labeled as suckers for suffering, guilt and punishment, and it’s not necessarily a bad label. We are supposed to be able to see a purpose in suffering, and that there is a virtue to shoulder our crosses, as well as each other’s crosses in life, because these are the very things that lead us through the passion of our lives, into the glory and resurrection. We have always been loath to advocate cheap grace, and there are shiploads of hawkers of cheap grace out there.

One of the ways in which we resist the offer of cheap grace is to even dare to be thankful for the pains and struggles in life, and for the seeming obstacles that are put in our way in life. To be fair, it takes a lot of purification in one’s life to come to that sort of living. This is living with a wide expanse.

Author Paula D’Arcy seems to be one such person. She had gone through so much pain and suffering in life, and in one fell swoop, in a very tragic automobile accident, her husband, together with their 21 month old daughter perished. She is a well-travelled inspirational speaker, and from her writings, I’d call her a person deeply in touch with the value of the Cross. She has come through her great cross in life, and it becomes for her the very thing that has brought her so close to God, and to see meaning in suffering and the Cross. When Jesus showed Thomas the holes in his hands after the resurrection, I am certain that looking at life through those holes must have been a very deep theology of salvation just in that one simple action. Jesus invites us always to do the same – see new life through those holes, a great symbol of redemptive suffering.

When you hear Ms D’Arcy speak in person, you cannot help but feel a very daring gratitude coming from her demeanor when she speaks of the tragedy that she went through. She knows that without the cross that she bore, seen under the shadow of the Cross of Christ, there is no real resurrection and glory. To be thankful for tragedies and struggles in themselves is not a good thing. Only masochists do that. But to literally shoulder the cross with others, in community, is a very powerful way to encounter heaven on earth.

When we are ungrateful, or insufficiently grateful in life, it can send out waves of discontent, especially when those looking at us know that we are Catholic, called to be images of Christ in the world. I read with an admixture of joy and sadness how the 33 Chilean trapped miners (most of whom are Catholic) were rescued from being entombed 700 over feet below the ground for 72 days. I saw human tenacity and cooperation at work. That brought joy. But it was only about three days later that reports came in about how some of the rescued miners were asking for money (and not paltry sums, apparently) for their story. If one has really been plucked from the jaws of death in a deep tomb and given a new lease of life, should gratitude come with a price tag? By placing any price, we immediately cheapen our lives, especially when it is a second chance that has been graciously and freely given.

It similarly saddened me to read how Celine Dion, a Catholic, is now awaiting the birth of her twins, which are the result of IVF. It’s such a pity that Ms Dion needs more reason to be grateful to God other than for her phenomenal voice and worldwide success. Her voice is undoubtedly a tremendous gift from God. Her first son was also a result of IVF, a process that the Church has always decried as putting us in the position of God. Apparently, getting one child through this method didn’t really satisfy, and it could well be a case of not having enough of a good thing.

If Ms Dion knows how Catholics need a model of faithfulness and tenacity in Cross bearing, her willingness to live in the mystery of an ‘empty womb’ borne with joy and faithfulness could bring her even more praise and peace from a world needing images of Christ, and not images of self-created joy. Ms Dion and her husband I am sure, will be very grateful when the twins are born, but could this hamper their ability to thank God for trials, crosses and unanswered prayers?

The two stories of the trapped miners and Ms Dion may seem unconnected, but what ties them together is that the world knows that they are Catholics. When the world’s eyes are on us, the effects of our actions become something that has repercussions beyond what we can imagine. Didn’t Jesus say ‘when a man has had a great deal given him on trust, even more will be expected of him’? Plenty indeed has been given to these two people. St Paul said that the life and death of each of us has an effect on others. Perhaps we forget this too easily when faced with moments of our own created joys.

The strength of our faith is seen at work not just when we are thankful when things go our way or when we have helpers who have worked behind the scenes in the unfolding of our tapestry of life. That is good manners. The strength of our faith must lie in the very difficult but necessary act of being thankful and grateful for even the crosses that we have in life, as it is often these, which bring us to the glory of the resurrection.

Suffering and surrender

2010-10-17T17:57:00.000-04:00

As priests, our pastoral encounters with our faithful include our sharing in their joys and sorrows, where there is also a sharing both in the tears of celebration and of sadness. We don’t often have to try to make some sense of a gathering when there is joy overflowing, like at weddings, birthdays and other similar occasions of happiness. But when we come to what I would call life’s border situations, quite often, what is asked of us is that some sense be made out of suffering in life. Sometimes this is explicitly asked of us, and at other times, it is asked implicitly, in the silence of the one suffering.

To be sure, it is a perennial question in life. Why is there suffering? The atheists would pounce of this as a clear sign that an all-benevolent God just doesn’t exist. And an insufficient picture of God’s immensity will naturally result in a refusal to see that suffering can exist within a loving heart of God. To expand our idea of God becomes then one of our lifelong spiritual challenges.

In just one afternoon this week, I presided at the cremation of a mother of two daughters who are young adults. She had suffered greatly for the last 32 days in the hospital ICU due to many infections, which resulted in a failure of her major organs. Later on in the same day, I visited a bedridden parishioner, another lady, who has multiple sclerosis. I could sense that there was a hanging question in the air about the meaning of suffering in the case of the dying woman’s family. Perhaps they were too distraught to formulate the question. But in the second case, there was a direct pondering over the question of the ‘why’ of suffering.

We can never get to the bottom of this question. And most of the time, we will come to a dead end, and perhaps even end up with our faith bruised and weakening if we fail to go further than ourselves. What can really help in these ‘border situations’ is to join our sufferings with the sufferings of Christ writ large on Calvary. There is a reason why we need to display large crucifixes, with the suffering Lord hanging on it. We are visual people, and we need our senses to be jolted every now and then to the reality of God’s love displayed in that immense show of love through a willing suffering. A pretty cross without any corpus on it may simplify too easily the reality of God’s love through suffering. When our going begins to get tough, when we are faced with real life suffering, the image of a suffering God who suffers with us makes our suffering a little easier to handle. Emmanuel, or ‘God-with-us’ then takes on a different dimension; a suffering dimension that is borne out of love.

I often like to encourage the infirm and those suffering in various ways, to lift their suffering to God in an act of surrender. Not so much as an act of hopelessness, but at act of faith, where we believe that God can make something beautiful and salvific and transformative out of something as inconceivable as a ‘gift’ of one’s suffering. After all, if God can make something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo, a very basic theological principle), certainly, he can also make something wonderful out of an offered suffering. The problem is that most of us don’t think that God can ‘creatively’ use a suffering. We throw our sufferings to God, we complain about it to him, but many of us don’t lift it up as an offering, with an air of loving surrender.

When we do that, we join Mary under the Cross of her Son, our Lord. Mary’s strength lay in the fact that she didn’t ask the question ‘why’? In the light of suffering, that question is just too common and too easily asked. It doesn’t take faith to ask that question. Non-believers ask that question all the time.

The transformative question that we need to learn to ask in the light of suffering is not ‘why’ but ‘how’. How can I contribute to the world’s salvation through this suffering? How is God speaking to me here? How can I help my faith to grow through this pain? How can I join Christ on the Cross, and from there, have the great hope of the resurrection as a personal experience?

To this end, Mary serves as our prime example because she didn’t ask to understand God’s plan. She just chose instead to stand under God’s plan.

Celebrating and not just attending the Eucharist

2010-10-10T17:55:00.000-04:00

One of the quotes of the Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta was addressed to priests, and it was to “celebrate each Mass as if it were your first Mass, and your last Mass”.

As a priest, it does make a lot of sense, and it strikes to the very core of my priesthood to read this. The Eucharist is unmistakably the highest form of worship anyone could ever partake in, and it is pure grace that allows us to be present at Mass. An act of utter and supreme thanksgiving, we join our sacrifice with Christ’s on Calvary, which becomes a gift most pleasing to God. Eucharistia is literally ‘thanksgiving’.

God gives of himself at each Mass, and when we are literally drawn into the act of love that goes on, we cannot but be awed and overwhelmed by what goes on. It is as if one is being included in a very intimate moment when the Son gives of himself so completely, so totally to the Father simply because the Father gave of himself so totally to the Son. And the exchange that happens is the Holy Spirit of love. It is consummation at its best, and we become invited, as it were, to this holy of holy exchanges. We are not observers, we are not by-standers, certainly not voyeurs, but we are literally drawn right into ‘the action’. We really don’t deserve to be present, but we are, and this exchange is made for our benefit, and yes, for our salvation.

But we have a great problem because this love that is given and received becomes very easily watered down and under-appreciated, as most loves are wont to be. Our human nature tends to take for granted things that we see too often, and encounter with great ease. Oft quoted is the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt”, though I wonder if ‘contempt’ may be too strong a word here.

The candles that are used at every Mass even though incandescent lights are easily available, is to remind all who are present that our sacred Mass was once celebrated in secret, almost in clandestine circumstances in the catacombs, right on the very tombs of the martyrs of our faith. It is a silent reminder to never take our faith, and the Holy Mass for granted, especially in places where religion is freely practiced.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to visit some beautiful atolls in the Indian Ocean. What really took my breath away was the beautiful flora and fauna that was so prevalent just meters outside of my sleeping quarters. Chatting with the boatmen who were natives of the place, I asked if they held a similar awe about the beauty just beneath them. Apparently, it was just too abundant for them to be struck by the beauty any more. It may seem strange that anyone could be blasé about such wondrous beauty lying literally at his or her doorsteps. Perhaps there is something in our humanity that requires of us a constant reminder to be present, and to allow ourselves to be enthralled afresh.

What then, should we be looking out for at each Mass? At which points should I be more present to? What should we then be attentive to?

This list is not comprehensive to say the least, but we should at least try to:
1) Be aware that the person sitting next to me, behind me and in front of me is God’s image to behold, respect and to love.
2) Truly be contrite for my brokenness when I pray the Confiteor (I confess), and knowing how undeserving I am of God’s infinite mercy, and then truly sing out with great joy the Gloria with an air of gratitude and praise because I am received with such Divine Mercy.
3) Mean my response when I am invited to chant it at the invitation of the Cantor, who is really the proclaimer of God’s word of life.
4) At the Creed, be aware that each creedal statement is an official response from the Magisterium about the truth of our faith as revealed by God, and be thankful that through the unfolding of history, there have been men and women who have fought so hard for the truth to be conveyed at the risk of their own lives, showing me that in life, some battles are really worth fighting for, and perhaps, some are really unnecessary.
5) Come to appreciate that at the Sanctus, I am invited to really join all the choirs of angels in heaven who are praising and adoring God as they behold him ‘face to face’. And when I know this, that it would be a travesty to keep mum, fold my arms and be indifferent when the priest ends his preface with “… we join the choirs of angels as they sing…”
6) When the priest, in Jesus’ words says “do this in memory of me”, recall all the acts of kindness and mercy that I have done in my life, and seen these not as my acts, but things done out of response to bring the memory of Jesus alive in my world. And when I remember that some of those times were really heartbreaking and sacrificial, that I joined Jesus in breaking the body, and pouring the blood for the good of the entire world.
7) Be fully present at the Doxology, which is the high point of the Mass, where the celebrant raises the consecrated bread and wine in a supreme act of sacrifice of Christ to the Father, and be brought present to Calvary where supreme surrender of love saved creation. And my “AMEN” then truly affirms and acknowledges this divine act of love.
8) Be in awe of the fact that when I receive Holy Communion, God wants to literally enter into me, a most unworthy host to the most Sacred Host.
9) And after receiving Communion, dare to be ‘lost’ a bit in true gratitude for this nourishment which strengthens me and beckons me to become further broken for others.

If just one person participating at Mass after reading this blog will do so with a new vision and purpose, with a new attentiveness and presence, this entry would have been worth the writing and the reading.

And when that happens, it really will not really matter even if that Mass were the first, and last Mass of his life, were he a celebrant, or laity.

Hold on to the Cross to win in life

2010-10-03T18:02:00.001-04:00

There is an annual contest here in Singapore where a radio station together with a car company as the main sponsor give away a brand new car to the person who can keep his or her hand on a specific spot on the car for the longest time without moving it. Apparently the record so far for this ‘feat’ is 81 hours, which works out to slightly over three days. Final contestants are decided randomly by a lucky draw, and this ‘challenge’ takes place in the piazza of a mall in downtown Singapore, where it is (so I am told) hyped up in a carnival-like atmosphere, where friends and relatives of the contestants come to support them and cheer them on, especially into the wee hours of the night, or when the torrential rains come.

It’s one of those ‘survivor’ type of contests, and the rules are stringent. One 5 minute break every 6 hours of standing, no moving of the hand off the car, no relieving of oneself while standing, no caps, sunglasses, drinks or food (except during that 5 minute break) and no communicating with any friend or family member either. I have never witnessed this but apparently, many people are interested in taking part in it, as the prize is rather attractive. After all, in Singapore, where owning a car is an unrealized dream for many, this seems to be a rather ‘simple’ way to get ownership of a brand new vehicle. Or so many seem to think.

While I don’t scoff or sniff at such events that are obviously drawn up to excite the masses, these things do set me thinking about the other more pressing and needful areas in life. And being a priest, one of them would be our spiritual lives and holding on to what really gives life.

Aren’t a lot of problems in our lives connected to the fact that at the critical moments of our lives, we have chosen to let go of faith and to choose the option that gives us the least problems? Or perhaps when we choose to hold on to what should be let go of, and let go what we should be holding on to? Right off the bat, a few come to mind.

A married woman ‘let’s go’ of her marriage and engages in an affair with someone who she feels ‘understands’ her, and gives her ‘love’; a couple is told by the gynaecologist that their unborn child has evidence of down syndrome, and choose to ‘let go’ of this child; a teen, just after Confirmation ‘let’s go’ of her faith and decides that going to church for Mass on Sundays is just not cool; a priest ‘let’s go’ of his vows of celibacy and finds someone to comfort him in his loneliness.

Are these surprising and far-fetched examples? Not really. They are instances (and there are many, many more) where there is a resistance to hold on to what really matters in life.

The contest that I referred to at the beginning of this morning’s reflection was for a car. Yes, in Singapore, this is a luxury item, and many would want to own one. But if just for a car, one is willing to not move one’s hand from the car, and stand in the blazing sun and the pouring rain, risk harm to one’s kidneys and bladder, deprive oneself of sleep, face starvation and dehydration, and experience moments of hallucination (it has been known to happen), it shows just how serious one is about the car.

What more for our faith, which is for ETERNITY? Dare we to say that we are equally or even remotely just as serious about faith as about a car? Our faith is often linked (and well it should) to the Cross of Christ, and it can be applied to all of life’s difficulties and challenges, especially those that have no direct answers for us. What we are meant to do as Christ’s disciples is to never let go of the Cross, because it is the Cross that saves us. (I shall not delve deeper into soteriology here, as theses galore have been written on it)

If we have been formed well in our faith in our early years, then it prepares us well for the times when we will encounter very tempting options to let go of the Cross for what appears to be more sensible, loss-cutting, comfort-bringing, logical and temporal options. When we do that, it would be akin to the contestants lifting their hands from car, and forfeiting the winning of the car.

Only in the case of our faith, we would have lifted our hands from the very cross that will save us. In the many challenges that we face in life, we would be circumspect to look carefully what we are literally holding on to, and what we should be letting go of.

Only the Pagans dance with the dead – or is that something we too should consider?

2010-09-26T17:59:00.000-04:00

The New York Times featured an interesting read about Famadihana, which is a Madagascan ritual or tradition, practiced more widely by the Malagasy people. In this tradition, the bones and (probably completely petrified by then) remains of the dead ancestors are brought out of their crypts once every 2 to 7 years. The living family members then, in a joyous atmosphere featuring live music, will literally dance with their deceased forebears, honouring them and remembering them and the contributions that they made to their present lives. Fresh silk linen is then used to wrap the bones once again reverently, before placing them back into the crypts. Apparently, the main motive behind this tradition is to give honour to the dead, and to celebrate their connectedness with the living.

A macabre dance? Unthinkable in our modern era? Something leftover from a former time when people just followed tradition blindly? Perhaps. But the little research that I did about this event taught me that the Catholic Church in Madagascar no longer objects to this as she regards this as a purely cultural rather than a religious event. It is the peoples’ way of respecting the dead and a chance for the whole family to come together, a time for communion with the dead and the living, and a means of avoiding or reducing guilt or blame.

I couldn’t help but be happy for the Malagasy Catholic folk who have this event to help them to reconnect with and to celebrate life, and in the process, be in touch (very literally here) with death, which is something that all of us will have to encounter and accept. Often, fear is one of the leading factors people cling on to life, and sometimes, it is not life that one is clinging on to, but what they perceive as giving them life. And that is why many are clinging on to guilt, habits, egocentricities, idiosyncrasies, materialism, and control. A healthy approach to death and dying must be featured in any religion that hopes to bring its devotees to any kind of maturity and growth. The more we shun any talk of it, the more we put it at the fringes of our conversation and speak in ‘sotto voce’ anything that connects with death and dying, a very unhealthy message is sent out to our younger generation that prevents them from growing up with a fearlessness and courage that truly marks a mature person.

In our Catholic faith, we have celebrations and feasts that honour the deceased – our loved ones (All Souls’ Day), our heroes (any feast of the Martyrs) and even the dying (few actually have participated in the very beautiful prayers for the Commendation of the Dying). Being in touch with God and one another at these ‘border situations’ allow us all to foster and develop what is known as a ‘mellowness of heart’. And I believe that it is this mellowness that helps one to be more charitable, patient, outreaching and merciful when it is asked of by both loved ones and those who hate us.

One thing that struck me about Famadihana was that it is supposed to be done in a spirit of joy and celebration. When we observe rites and rituals about our deceased, don’t we often leave out that element? When we clean the gravesites or visit their columbaria where their remains are kept, we don’t often go with ‘celebration’ in our hearts, being thankful for the joy our connectedness gave us, and even continues to give us despite our physical separation? Even our funeral Masses are ‘celebrated’, aren’t they? We must come to a point in our lives when indeed, the lives of our deceased are truly celebrated and not just mourned.

Anyone who has participated in a funeral liturgy, and has known the deceased lying in the casket, will be moved. The irony that presents itself there is almost deafening – the one person who cannot move anymore, who cannot breath anymore and whose heart has stopped beating is the one person who can bring all who are present there to move in a new way, breathe in a new way, and for his or her heart to beat in a new way, and from there, walk in a new way, especially when we become reminded of our own mortality and promise that our lives can bring to others.

When our lives are moved in that way, aren’t we also doing a sort of ‘Famadihana’ of our kind, where we ‘dance’ with the dead?

Heaven - is it out of this world?

2010-09-19T18:05:00.001-04:00

When I was in my teens, there was a song by the then popular singer Belinda Carlisle called “Heaven is a place on earth”. Someone asked me recently if this is something that the Church teaches, or if it is just some poetic phrasing that gives us all some sort of whimsical hope in the midst of much suffering and pain.

First of all, I suppose we have to ask how we’d define ‘heaven’. Is it a place where there is no suffering or pain, no disappointment or sadness? Is it a state where one is fully in divine union and as it were, seeing God ‘face to face’ and not die? Is it life with no end? If ‘heaven’ is any of these (or all of them), then I suppose it’s not too right to say that heaven is a place on earth.

Secondly, what is ‘place’? If by ‘place’ we mean a physical location, where all those mentioned above are experienced, then certainly, it would be akin to believing in the existence of the fictional Shangri-La featured in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – a fabled city synonymous with an earthly paradise.

But if by ‘place’ we mean a place in time, a moment, a snatch of reality, then yes, perhaps it is more plausible that heaven is a place on earth.

Jesus himself taught his disciples to pray “your kingdom come”. Many of us don’t stop and linger enough on this phrase when we utter the Lord’s Prayer. Some may even harbour mental images of Armageddon and for this reason, want to gloss over any such thoughts as quickly as possible.

But what are the values and principles of the ‘kingdom of God’? Any of the beatitudes of Christ would be a good description. When one understands what blessedness is; when one embraces (not merely tolerates) poverty that opens one to an abundance; when one truly knows the gift of tears through which one’s own vision of life is cleansed or when one doesn’t stop living just because others are putting down life. These moments don’t last for a long time in this life as we know it. At most, we catch snippets and glimpses of these and are given insights to heaven.

Just taking Matthew 25 to heart, and knowing that in our outreach, we have clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the incarcerated allows us to see that the hidden Christ awaits us in these people and gives us a chance to experience a ‘place’ on earth where heaven can be touched.

Richard Rohr said it so well when he said that it is heaven all the way to heaven and hell all the way to hell. There is a certain ability that we have in us to make the choices to give others and ourselves that heavenly experience for albeit a brief moment in time. Conversely, I believe that we too hold in our choices a brief moment of hell every time we are party to the inflicting of suffering, pain, or any form of killing. And eternal extension of this would be hell to the hilt.

Yes, as much as heaven is and can be a place on earth, so too can hell. How real it is, I suppose, has a lot to do with how much I contribute consciously towards it and cooperate with the grace of God.

God's busy - can I help you?

2010-09-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

I was in town last week, and spotted a man wearing a T-Shirt with a rather eye-catching phrase emblazoned across the front. It had the drawing of what was obviously the scowl of the Devil (in the typical fashion of a horned beast-like visage) in the middle part of the T-Shirt. On top of this was the phrase “God’s busy”, and on the bottom of it, the second part of the phrase was “Can I help you?”

Just on the level of words, or some other superficial level, there is some kind of humour involved there that might elicit a chuckle or two. But as all things are, if we can find the humour in it, it means that there is some relation, some connection to reality as we see it. That is what makes something funny. Like the old joke about what three priests did to chase away the pigeons that were making a mess of the parish grounds. They finally decided to baptize and confirm the pigeons because that would mean they would hardly come back again. If we find that funny (and it is on some level), it means that in reality, we do see this actually happening, where teenagers once confirmed hardly come back to church at all.

As I pondered further on the message of that T-Shirt, it became apparent that for many people, God is someone who is meant to be doing things all the time, and many people seem to find that they can hardly get God’s attention. God’s ‘job’ seems to be to be constantly running from person to person, making sure that his or her requests and wishes are met with efficiency – like some divine Concierge, so that he gets the love that he craves for. It’s like as if that was God’s job description.

But is that God’s principal task? The opposite seems to be the other common idea of God – that he is distant and uninvolved with our lives (that’s the Deist’s mis-understanding of God), and he is imaged like that great retired architect of the universe, who just stays in some corner after creation, and watches, from a distance, how we manage to get on till the end of time.

Truth be told, both extreme views are toxic, and leads us to a host of problems. The former will always make us God, and leave God becoming our slave and runner (or concierge). Our ‘job’ as human beings is then to “direct” God so that he knows what we need, and to get him to do our bidding through a series of holy transactions. If I fulfill X number of novenas, or if I don’t commit sin, or if I don’t miss Mass on Sundays, God will be happy, and grant what I want. And if he doesn’t, then, as the T-Shirt says, he’s probably busy with other peoples’ requests. (It seems that God cannot multi-task). And what’s worse is the suggestion that we seek the Devil’s assistance, which implies that the Devil has a greater ability and far greater resources than God.

The other extreme view is equally toxic - that God is almighty, God is creator, but he’s so far and distant from us. He’s hardly interested and is just waiting for it all to end. The incarnation, showing God’s deep interest in our well-being is totally ignored, and his stepping into our world concretely is totally rejected. God’s love has nothing at all to do with anything. People with this notion will be those who have no supreme pattern or blueprint of love (from God) to mirror, and would probably reject any suggestion that we should be loving beings, following the love of God that created us. They become the author of their own lives.

What most of us struggle with is the middle path between the two, where on the one hand, God is needy and simply hopes for our worship, obeisance and love, and the other, where God is disinterested and ambivalent towards us. Keeping that balance between the two extremes is thus the task of faith, where we allow God to unfold his divine plan in our lives in his time. It takes a lot of humility to be led (often in silence), and to not think that when he is silent, that he is busy, and to go to the Devil for help.

The problem is that if the Devil is only imaged in his most horrible, macabre and heinous form, we will outrightly reject him. But truth be told, he is also known as ‘the Deceiver’, ‘the Accuser’ and the ‘Father of Lies’. Every sin known to humankind is always seen as an attractive, sensible and justifiable option. That’s the way evil works, and that is the only way evil seems to operate. Evil will hardly present itself as a sinful, iniquitous and nefarious choice.

What a close walk with the Lord in prayer gives us is a deep inner sense to detect ‘what is’ from ‘what appears to be’. And we will then have eyes to differentiate between holiness and hatefulness, and between glorifying God and horrifying God.

Perhaps it’s not that God is too busy. We are. And most of the time, busy with the wrong things.

Restoring distorted views

2010-09-05T19:18:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I met a German Jesuit priest at a meeting in Malaysia. Fr Gunther has spent more than 40 years in Japan as a missionary. In one of my conversations with him, I was enlightened about quite a few things about Catholicism in the Land of the Rising Sun. Only about 0.5% of the population there are Catholics, which bring the number to slightly above the half million mark.

Apparently, there are Japanese who have absolutely no notion that Christmas has links to the Church, let alone anything to do with Christ! As is evident in many countries, hotels and department stores in Japan do brisk business at that time of the year. Hotels tout it as a season of love (somewhat akin to Valentine’s Day) and promote hotel room packages for couples to ‘shack up’ for Christmas Eve. Department stores have sales that slash prices to pack in the shoppers. Certainly, this is not a phenomenon unique to Japan, but his following comment floored me. He once invited some Japanese to his Jesuit church in the heart of Tokyo to experience Christmas Mass, and they sniggered at him and said (with hands covering a smile, in a typical Japanese fashion) “What? Christmas has even come to the Church now? What can you possibly be selling there?”

This may seem bizarre, and I found it highly amusing. However, I couldn’t help but see that we too have shades of this kind of ignorance on our own shores. Maybe not regarding Christmas, but many other areas of life.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI published the encyclical letter Humane Vitae. It served as a reminder to the world that life is sacred, and that God is the ultimate giver and creator of life. Any manipulation or prevention of the natural-ness of life becomes then man’s assertion of his will over that of God’s. One of the very common reactions that came from many Catholics (and understandably, many non-Catholics too) was “what right has the Church to come into my bedroom”.

When Fr Gunther related the comment the Japanese made about Christmas creeping into the Church, it immediately brought to mind this comment that many people had about Humane Vitae, and what right had the Church to enter peoples’ bedrooms. Just as some Japanese think that Christmas is only about sales and romancing in rented hotel rooms and celebrating love in a Valentine’s Day fashion, perhaps so too do many Catholics mistakenly think that sex is only about doing what we want, when we want, and in any way we want.

Only when Fr Gunther makes the effort to share with the Japanese people the true meaning of Christmas, that Christ’s incarnation was God’s greatest gift to humanity, will they begin to see that what they have now as a commercialization is really a misguided and distorted view of Christmas. It is the Christ event that has the priority, and from that all other celebrations and observances flow. In Philosophical language, the Christ event is thus the ‘a priori’, which is Latin for 'what comes before'.

Similarly, only when we as people of God make the effort to understand, respect and appreciate God’s original plan for life (that happiness is not about insisting on rights but in the deeper giving and sharing of life) will we begin to see that our comments about keeping the Church out of our bedrooms is really a misguided view. The common phrase ‘safe sex’ that is touted by so many people, from governments to prostitutes, signals an aberration and a departure from God’s original plan. It gives many the idea that sex is something dangerous and harmful and unsafe, if one needs to practice safety in its celebration. Isn’t it the truth that it is we who have taken something sacred and beautiful and desecrated it to the extent that it became something to be protected against?

We all struggle with many areas in life. Some of them may be because we have misguided and distorted views of God’s original intent for us. What would help us is when we pray for both wisdom and humility. Wisdom to see truth, and humility to accept change and conversion.

Faithfulness in spending time with the Eucharistic Lord

2010-08-29T18:12:00.001-04:00

“What do we do with our time in the Adoration Room, Father?” is a question that I have been asked by both baptised Catholics and Catechumens alike. We all know that prayer is important, and it has been said by many spiritual greats that a most noble thing to do is to spend a holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament daily. But some have shared with me that they feel a sense of boredom and tiredness after the first five or ten minutes in the silence of the adoration room. This shouldn’t surprise anybody.

In our spiritual lives, what we are developing is a relationship with God. The only thing that we have in this life that gives us any similar experience is our relationship with people (or animals for some). What sustains a marriage is not the fireworks or exciting moments in a marriage. They certainly do happen, but they are not the norm. Any marriage that has lasted more than ten years will attest that the moments of excitement that give us consolation and assurance are like ‘treats’. Dependence on ‘treats’ all the time can become ‘threats’ when they are missing. There is the phrase in the English language that when something lasts, it ‘stands the test of time’. We don’t say that it ‘stands the test of excitement’. A marriage that celebrates a milestone of 25 or 50 years is precisely that – half a century of staying in the boredom, the silence, the non-exciting moments and yes, even the fights and disagreements that grew the couple and matured their sacrificing love for each other.

My own parents are going to celebrate their 50 years of married life next year in December, and I will be the first to attest that these 50 years were not a bed of roses. Then again, perhaps it really has been a bed of roses – complete with the thorns. But I am very proud to say that mum and dad have stayed in their difficulties and stresses and strains, being an example for me to stay in my priesthood when there are great moments of stresses and strains too. Most couples only want the bliss in their marriage. There’s nothing wrong with that, but with the bliss come the blisters as well.

What a regular holy hour does for us is to train us for those moments when nothing is quite happening in our lives, in our marriages, and in our priesthood. When there are no fireworks, no affirmations, no great insights, and no excitement. But we stay in there for the full hour till the buzzer sounds because we want to be people of commitment, which leads to help us to become people of maturity and people of substance.

Moreover, we stick to our holy hour not so much for what it gives to us, but also for what it allows us to give to God, especially when it is done with love. When a couple stays in a marriage that isn’t exciting but because they love, it is a sign that they somehow know that loving embraces a suffering that comes in many ways.

So, to the question “what do I do with our time in the Adoration Room, Father?” my answer would be “just decide to stay there, in fidelity, and be present to Real Presence, and love will be really present in the decision”. After all, in order for love to be endearing, it has to be enduring as well.

Treating confession as a statin for sins.

2010-08-22T18:32:00.002-04:00

In the 15 August issue of the American Journal of Cardiology, it was apparently reported that a Dr Darrel Francis and his colleagues calculated that the reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin (a drug that acts to reduce the level of fats, including triglycerides and cholesterol in the blood) is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake. They’ve worked out that in terms of the likelihood of one having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce one’s risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it. And here is the most uproarious suggestion – they are proposing that fast food outlets provide these statins free with the meal that they serve, and as such, allow their customers to eat with much less risks of heart attacks due to clogged arteries.

A strange piece of apparently irrelevant information in the medical world to be mentioned in my spiritual blog, you may think. After all, what do I know about medicine? I was actually listening to my radio while doing my morning run last week when I heard this commented on by the radio announcer in between songs, and then it dawned upon me that this is precisely the kind of mentality that doesn’t help us much to address what really needs to be addressed in our lives - by a proper attitude, mentality and overall approach.

While Dr Francis and his team did say in their report that it is better to avoid fatty food altogether, this is not what their report centered on. Instead, what they are proposing is that people should be able to eat their burgers and have it (the statins, to be precise). Literally.

In discussions and conversations regarding the Sacrament of Reconciliation and God’s mercy, I have often heard people remarking “It’s a good thing we have confession in the Catholic Church, because we can do what we want, and then after that, go for confession to get absolution”. With this view of God’s mercy and forgiveness, aren’t we a bit like Dr Francis and his team? The only difference is that the latter is connected to our physical health, while the former to our spiritual health.

The graces that we receive from encountering God’s mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation must encourage us to want to make the needed changes in our lives to veer away from sin, to turn away – to be converted. It’s certainly not an excuse to allow us to sin in any carefree way. As Dr Francis pointed out, albeit briefly, it is better to avoid fatty food altogether. Health advocates have always said that it is better to change one’s lifestyle altogether rather than lean on the administration of a drug and think that it’s ok to continue a destructive or far less beneficial lifestyle and harmful eating habit. So too for the spiritual life.

But we seem to be obsessed with a ‘quick-fix’ world, where it is far easier and convenient to pop a pill, buy a diploma, buy on credit, hope for a strike in a visit to a casino, and get a strong and fast with steroids than to do the harder thing in life – change one’s lifestyle, learn by studying, save one’s salary, work hard and train and eat properly to get strong.

Have we as a people become so single-minded in our quest for getting what we want whenever we want and however we want? And when we find our plans and dreams for sustaining our defined happiness stymied, do we find ourselves finding loopholes and other openings just so that we can still get our ‘fix’ rather than look squarely at what may be harming us and say that it is those areas that need fixing instead? That’s whole area of life is called conversion, and I believe that it lies at the heart of every successful dieter, anyone who has truly made headways in making improvements to their health, and of course, anyone who has encountered God’s mercy and made the necessary changes that marks deep spiritual conversion.

Yes, it may be far easier to swallow a statin and eat that cheeseburger, but it would be wishful thinking that we have become healthier people. To be sure, the ability to change and experience true and lasting conversion doesn’t come overnight. It is a repeated “yes” to God and God’s will over and over and over again, with repeated falls and repeated experienced of his mercy and grace.

Just as no one becomes healthy overnight, neither does one become a saint overnight.

We all have a quest for God and transformation. Do we?

2010-08-15T18:45:00.005-04:00

As a priest and a person who is deeply concerned in the spiritual development of his people, I come across a great number of people who seem not have the view that there is in us an inherent need for God, and that there is no real need to want any sort of transformation.

I am not talking about people outside of the faith or people who are unchurched. I am referring instead to those who are baptized, people who do come to weekly Mass on Sundays, and perhaps even people who are in active ministry. Herein lies a sad reality – that there are many who are just not interested in growth, in maturity, in seeing God’s surprising ways that he can show up at life’s doorstep, and what he is leading us to. There exists in a great many people the idea that God, religion and anything spiritual are simply items to be ticked from a list of other items on life’s agenda.

While I am not saying that we should simply become fanatics and abandon jobs, friends, or family to ‘follow Christ’, I have realized that many are not even considering that it is in the arena of life where God enters in and moves us. Perhaps that explains why so many simply get back to being irascible, argumentative, obstreperous, road bullies, abusive, and display a whole assortment of mean spirited behaviours right after the priest dismisses them at the close of Holy Mass on Sundays. One wonders if there was really any communion at any level when Holy Communion was received. For many, all that negativity seems to be far more real than the God whom they were supposed to encounter and worship.

Perhaps it is for the better that I don’t have a business-mind as I go about my quest for aiding spiritual transformation and trying to be the catalyst for this to happen in peoples’ lives. Just by sheer numbers alone, I am sure that I have not really succeeded in this proposition. Jaded fellow priests who have experienced many a disappointment in their priestly lives may even wonder why it took me so long to come to this realization. I must admit that sometimes, I do find myself wondering why too.

But this is where I have to look deeply and lovingly at Our Lord and allow myself to be with him on Calvary – alone and abandoned, save for a few faithful friends. Even then, was he even sure that they really got the message of living transformed lives, of embracing the beatitudes and of the true meaning of the Cross? And this is also when I need to recall what Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta so often said – what God wants is faithfulness, not success.

Post Script:
Dear blog readers - I have a simple request. I do notice that some of you tend to leave anonymous comments, and I do hesitate to post these, for various reasons. One of them is that I think it helps us in our spiritual growth to really stand up for what we say and be accountable. It's really a sign of maturity. So, can I ask that you identify yourselves, or at least say which country you are posting from. At least this way, I get to know if my blog is read by people outside of Singapore. Thank you so much and God bless.

Seeing through the eyes of Christ - a new empathy

2010-08-08T18:54:00.001-04:00

Bishop Fulton J Sheen was once quoted as saying this about suffering – “Tears are not without value, provided one sees a purpose in their shedding. As the morning rose is sweetest when embalmed with dew, so love is loveliest when embalmed in tears. Many a person sees God through tears more often than in the sunlight; in fact, tears may leave the vision of the eyes clear for stars.”

Only a person who has struggled through years of tears and endured a prolonged period of pain of a wounded heart can speak of suffering in such an erudite way. Just about everybody has cried tears of sadness, rejection, failure and loneliness at some time or other. Yet not everyone carries in them a similar strength and depth of character through the pain. Could the answer lie in the ability to lift this woundedness up to God in faith and trust.

There are many who have come to see me carrying in them a lot of wounds. When these wounds are identified, the perfectionist in me often hopes to give the most assuaging counsel, offering the best solution. But as I grow in my priesthood, I have learnt to see that sometimes, it is not a solution that is best offered, but perhaps something else – a listening with depth. I have also found that this is strangely, one of the hardest things to do.

Just to hear is not hard. But to listen with empathy and to ‘get into the shoes of the other’ entails a lot more. It means putting aside my tasks, my agenda, and even my thoughts and correct pre-formed solutions. This takes a dying to self, which is something that almost all of us fight so hard not to do. But it is only when we do this that we can end up sharing a woundedness that can bring about a shared healing at the same time. Platitudes and model answers may be something that many of us priests are tempted to give, but it takes a lot of love to not rely on them, but to enter-into the woundedness of the wounded heart. Professional counselors will advise against too much of entering into, because one can lose objectivity. This is sound advice, but it can also end up making us very distant and cold.

This could well be the greatest difference between the professional counselor and the healing that comes from Christ. Christ is one who has let no wall or barrier come between the creature and the creator. In Luke’s account of the crucifixion, we are told that the veil of the temple was torn right down the middle. A tiny detail, but a very important one. We are given a glimpse of the significance of Christ’s stepping into our humanity did – he removed all barriers and walls that hitherto existed between God and our sinful selves. By becoming man, God breaks all barriers to our woundedness and truly enters into our wounds, walking the walk of our sin and shame. He fought against giving us those pre-planned answers and platitudes. God no longer just listens from afar to our plaintive cries of our human suffering. This God of ours cries our tears and carries our crosses as well. Gal 2:22 gives us much hope because truly, it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. Our tears and our struggles are not just ours, but are now a shared sorrow that leads to a healing that is similarly shared.

When it is difficult to enter into the shoes of the wounded standing right in front of us, it becomes most necessary to cherish what the incarnation and the passion of Christ did. Because of the incarnation, God sees us through very human eyes, and he has a new empathy for us. What Bishop Sheen said about the value of human tears can perhaps also be said of God’s tears shed on Calvary as well – there was a great purpose in that shedding that day, and it left God with a ‘Christed’ vision for our broken humanity.

If because of Calvary, we can now see God through the eyes of Christ, would it be audacious to say that even God sees us now through those same eyes?

Finding God with dis-ease

2010-08-01T23:09:00.001-04:00

Thomas Merton, the noted Cistercian writer and monk, was once quoted as saying “If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found”.

Coming across this quotation set me thinking this week, as I came across quite a few people who in passing, have mentioned to me that the Church with its rituals and rites have made it so difficult and tedious for us to come to God. “God is everywhere after all” seems to be a common remark, and indeed he is. “But do we really need all this ritual just to get to meet him?” Apparently, in many peoples’ minds, if God is so keen on us getting close to him, he should be the one who makes the effort to come and meet us, rather than making us go out of our way to meet him. And the Church should make it easier and more convenient for us to do this.

What has been an oversight is that God did make that great effort. And he not only did it once when creation began, he also did it much more magnificently in the incarnation when he became man, showing us how to really live. Jesus showed us so many times that God has a great hunger for us to come close to him, and that barriers have been removed, starting with the very affectionate way that we can address God as Abba, Father. But he did take a rather circuitous route.

The current secular mind seems to be steeped in the belief that things should be made easier and easier in every arena of our lives. After all, gadgets and gizmos are constantly being developed just so that we don’t have to really make much effort to even leave our homes as we have everything at our fingertips. More and more people work from home, and there are a whole lot of people who can earn a living working for years without needing to physically encounter another human being. For many, this arrangement seems to work just fine. But problems abound when this kind of convenience is wanted and even expected in the area of our spiritual lives.

The very word ‘disciple’ has the same root as the word ‘discipline’. We don’t have to look very hard to see that any discipline in life entails a training, a shaping and an adjustment of sorts. The spiritual life is precisely this – a lifelong training as a disciple of Christ. But perhaps this is not something that is readily acknowledged by many baptized Catholics. In my casual conversations with many adult Catholics, it has become clear to me the notion of Catholics being disciples of the Lord is hardly ever fathomed. Most are just contented to be baptized, almost as a form of membership. Where did this insufficient notion come from? How do we even begin to correct this, let alone point it out? Perhaps a mis-informed catechesis was what started the mal-formed adult Catholic mind and heart.

It is not much wonder then that when such a mind gets influenced by the secular mind , many of us can erroneously expect things of the faith to be reduced to quick sound bites and succinct paragraphs, and have us think that just because we have the one-paragraph answers, we are mature in our spirituality. This becomes evident when many become impatient and even intolerant of God who seems to make things inconvenient and difficult for his beloved people.

Scott M Peck’s book “The Road Less Travelled” comes to mind as I reflect on this, as indeed, it is often the more winding, arduous and discipline-required road that is far less chosen, but it can also be the one that leads us to God in a mature and patient way.

The quality of life is a shared responsibility

2010-07-25T19:13:00.000-04:00

Sometime last week, an article in the paper highlighted the very sad story of a man in England who suffered a stroke 20 years ago while in Athens. Doctors there managed to save his life, but for the past 20 years, this man had been ‘trapped’ in a body that was left mostly paralyzed. He can only blink and nod in response to questions, and cannot even talk. He is cared for 24-hours a day for basic things like bathing and even his most personal needs. What the article highlighted was his appeal to the Court of Law in England to lift the ban on assisted suicide because he wants his wife to help him to die and to end his life which “has no quality”. He wanted to make sure that his wife would not land herself on the wrong side of the law for assisting him to die.

Cases like his abound, and each one centers around a person who is in a very dark place in life. Often, the circumstances are dire, and one would need to have the sensitivity of a rag doll to not have a smidgen of empathy when encountering such stories and plights. What this person wants is basically a “right” to end his life. This is something that the Church (which is the voice of God and reason) has great reason to denounce as morally wrong, and will never condone.

Is the church harsh, perhaps too harsh with people like this man and his wife? Can the Church not see that it is frustrating and perhaps even ‘meaningless’ to live this way – to be so highly dependent on others and thus placing emotional, financial and even physical strain on loved ones and care-givers?

At the heart of the matter is not so much the right to end life, but rather, the question of “who is the giver of life?” What must be upheld is that the ultimate giver of life is God, and that it is only God who can have the right to end it. He gave life to us out of love (and that is why life should only come out from a love-making situation, and not in a separated clinical way, where husband and wife are in a non-unitive state, and are assisted by clinicians and Petri-dishes in laboratories).

God’s love is at the heart of our life, and the mystery of God’s generosity is played out throughout our earth-bound years. It is clear that our human love is shown to our loved ones in various ways. Well, so too is God’s love for us. Our love for our children often is not readily perceived as “love”. We have only to think about the ways we discipline them, when we don’t give them everything they want whenever they want, and especially when we have to stomach the very heart-wrenching phrase every parent dreads to hear (“I HATE you”) as we show them love to see that our loving actions and choices towards them is often unperceived as love.

What more with God’s love? The problem with us is that we have wired ourselves to only see “love” with blinkers on, and in very limited ways – and usually only when it suits us, when it feels good, and often, only when there is immediacy in returns. And when we hardwire ourselves this way, we often end up insulating ourselves from other non-obvious ways of love, which can often include a suffering – not just in ourselves, but from the community around us.

Not many of us appreciate being dependent on others, even on loved ones. It takes a lot of humility to accept to being cared for by others. Since the beginning of man’s creation, that stretching out of the hand of Eve to grab of the proverbial fruit from the knowledge of good and evil showed our innate unwillingness to be led, to be patient, and to wait for an unfolding. We have vestiges of this inability and unwillingness whenever in our lives we want the answers here and now, and in ways that are crystal clear. And when it doesn’t seem to make sense to our limited minds, when we need to sit with our logical mind, when we are, as in Richard Rohr’s words, ‘dualistic’, we will want out. Many have lost their faith in the process of waiting, and perhaps like that man in England, seem to have come to the end of their tethers.

It would be too simplistic to say that the wrong lies only in the choice of the paralysed Englishman alone. Could it also be the shared fault of the community surrounding the man as well? Perhaps it has not done all it could to reach out to him. Proverbially, Eve reached out to take the forbidden fruit. Perhaps it would have been much better that she reached out instead to take Adam’s hand, and asked him to stay with her in her inability to stay in the mystery of unknowing? When the community of not just that Englishman, but all of us, who are ‘paralyzed’ in small and large ways refuse to reach out, or refrain for whatever reasons to reach out, we make it easy for many to reach the end of their tethers too.

Would it then not be unthinkable that the kind of life the Englishman has is defined as having no ‘quality’? In the true Christian sense of the word, quality is as much in the giving as it is in the receiving – of care, of charity, of patience, and of love. It would not be just the wife of the man who would be the one killing – the community actually started killing slowly many years ago.

We only need to look Luke 5:17-26 to see that it was really the faith of the community that saved the paralytic in that pericope. I believe that must be our call as well.