How can sadness be a virtue to our souls? Is this a conundrum to be solved?

 Ever since I was a young child, I was given to accept that in all lives, without exception, there will be the inevitable experience of sadness and gloom, most especially when we ourselves or somebody close to us suffers a terrible affliction in life.  These afflictions are varied, and because there is no way to avoid them completely, when these happen to us, we just must accept the pain and sorrow and only when we manage to do this, we will just be absorbed and overtaken by them and sink, inescapably, into the abyss of darkness that seems endless.

 

As a priest and shepherd of souls, I have presided at many funeral Masses and have been present at so many cremations of the deceased that I have lost count of them.  At each one of them, there is always the experience of witnessing the surviving family members and loved ones of the deceased person completely wracked with anguish, grief, hopelessness and melancholy.  Do these emotions show a raw weakness of those who survive the deceased in the casket?  Should these emotions be avoided and negated no matter how difficult it can be?  The human instinct in these situations is to go up to the sorrowful person and stand steadily next to them and utter the phrase “Please don’t cry.  Be strong.  Your friends and family don’t know how to handle your copious tears.” 

 

Although these words seem to be the sensitive and correct thing to do, all it does is that it avoids the truth that at these moments of dark and inconsolable grief, that there actually is something truly beneficial and positive about grief and tears in these moments of despair.  Our weak humanity wants to run away from our moments and encounters with death, illness, sadness and any sense of loss.  Escapism is our modus operandi in the face of affliction and suffering.  We may escape from these moments of harshness and darkness, but at best, it is only a momentary escape.  The sad fact is that it will return to bother and haunt us later on in life, and because it is so raw and real, it makes repeated returns into our lives, breaking us all over, again and again.

 

One of the lovely movies that shows us how hidden the goodness of pain and tears are in our lives was so prominently revealed in a gem of a movie called The Shack.  It began as a novel written by a Canadian author named William P. Young, and it tells of how a man handled the horrendous and painful loss of his young daughter who was abducted and murdered by a serial killer and the little girl’s body was never found. 

 

Mackenzie, the father of the girl, receives and invitation to go the shack to meet “Papa”.  The long and short of it is that Mack does go to the shack alone, and it is in that shack that he encounters the manifestation of the three persons of the Holy Trinity, where Papa is an African-American woman, God the Son is a Middle Eastern carpenter, and the Holy Spirit reveals himself as an Asian woman named Sarayu.

 

 

There are several one-to-one encounters of Mack and each of them, and the one that is most beautiful and mind-opening is one where Sarayu sees Mack crying when he talks about his murdered daughter.  This is where Sarayu uses a small glass vial and collects the tears streaming from Mack’s eyes.  Mack is puzzled and asks why Sarayu does this.  Her explanation is this – Mack, God does not let these tears of grief and sadness go to waste.  God collects them and uses them in a positive way.  However, most people do not allow themselves to cry, and that is a waste. 

 

It is later in the story, that Mack discovers the body of his daughter, and very sadly carries the dead body to be tenderly buried in the ground, and after the body is covered with earth, Sarayu takes out the vial of Mack’s collected tears and sprinkles the tears all over the burial spot.  It is when the tears get absorbed by the soil that beautiful flowers and a majestic tree sprouts immediately over the grave site, and the flowers that bloom from the plants and the tree fills the entire place with so much life and loveliness. 

 

It doesn’t take a philosopher to understand that this is a precious lesson that there is so much positivity that come from the painful process of tears, sorrow and lamentation.  Jesus himself was so aware of this because in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was crucified, he cried out to his Father, saying “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”  At that point of great sorrow and distress, Jesus had a very clear knowledge that something truly good will come out of the passion that he was to undergo that would culminate in his shameful death on the cross of Calvary.  The flowers and fruit that will come out of his passion is the undeserved grace of divine mercy that extends to every single one of his followers and disciples, and right up to this very moment, we the baptized in Christ, are the living and breathing fruit and flowers of the empty tomb of Jesus. 

 

Beautiful and poignant this truth is it is also truly challenging to impart this to members of the flock of the Church.  It remains the task and endeavor of every ordained priest worth his ordination to try in various ways to break this truth to the people he ministers to in his parish.  We need to go against our human intuition to escape from our sufferings and failures, to bring life to those who surround us in life.  We owe it to them, and we owe it to ourselves.

 

We need to begin with the hard task of identifying the ways that we are so prone to run away from our pains and sorrows in life.  Once we do that, it is half the battle won.  The other half is to courageously admit of our foolish ways, seek God’s divine mercy for our shallow ways, and cry those tears we may have been withholding for so many years. 

 

And once we do that, we will be providing the Holy Spirit with so much to fill those vials so that He can use them to copiously water the parched and lifeless soils of so many lives and allow thousands to live resurrected lives. 

The unseen and innocently ignored message of true Christianity

Many people, Christian and otherwise, know about the message and teaching of Christmas.  Yes, it is well known and accepted that love is the message of the newborn baby in a manger in faraway Bethlehem, and this message has been preached, acted out, and sung about in numerous countries and civilisations throughout the world.  Somehow, it is perhaps due to this message spoken of and written about ad nauseam, it also does have a negative effect - it has also ignored and sidestepped the crucial message of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.  I am referring to the importance of being welcoming to the stranger.

In the Old Testament, there were so many prophets who spoke emphatically about how imperative it was to welcome the stranger or the foreigner.  After all, the Israelites were a displaced people, and they themselves were always seeking a home for their people.  They were so familiar with the experience of being a stranger or a foreigner, and in his own life, Jesus stood side by side with the prophets from of old.  

For Jesus, God not only had a preferential option for the poor.  In Jesus, God was in the poor!  And his message to both his disciples and his followers was to always have a space in their hearts and lives for orphans, widows, lepers and strangers.  This was such an affront to the Pharisees who were only keen to keep the strict laws of Moses.  They confronted Jesus numerous times for dining with public sinners and even tax collectors.  To the Pharisees, this would inevitably sully and stain the very being of a righteous Jew.  Jesus’ well-quoted retort to them was that the healthy do not need the attention and care of a doctor, but it is the sick who do.  All of humanity was sick in their souls due to the sin of Adam, also called original sin.  Jesus came as a doctor of the soul to assuage this malignancy through his willingness to die on the cross of Calvary in the most shameful and despicable way.  

It is so telling that in the 25th chapter of St Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples about the last judgment, and how the people will be like either sheep or goats.  What Jesus will judge is the way we either gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, or how we welcomed strangers who came to us while we were alive.

Those that will be sent into the eternal fire will be those that failed to give food to the hungry, provide water to the parched, and those who gave no welcome and those who did not visit those who were in prison.  The clincher is at the end, when Jesus reveals “what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.”  

Knowing this can be very disconcerting for those who hail Jesus as Lord, King, Saviour and Messiah.  How real Jesus was to us will be judged if we have indeed seen him in the sick, the poor, the marginalised, and the despised.  This Jubilee Year is one where the late Pope Francis calls us to give not just hope, but ‘spes nonconfundit.’   In our common parlance, it means ‘hope does not disappoint.’  

We need to train our eyes and hearts to be able to see and perceive Christ who is very much present in those we naturally tend to avoid and side-step in life.  Our baptism needs to be seen as a day when our eyes were opened in a new way to see life anew.  

There are many people in the world who are either refugees or facing immigrant issues.  Many are facing humongous humanitarian crises, and as Christians, we cannot be too quick to turn away from their needs and not see their need.  

Undoubtedly, facing these rejects of society is a highly sensitive and it would be naive to think that these are not complex issues to deal with.  Of course, dealing with them will impact us politically, socially, economically and will have an effect on our security issues too.  But what is so important is that there is no way we can justify our lack of positive response on Christian grounds.  Yes, Jesus had a divine heart to love all sinners so as to die on Calvary for us.  We need to pray for a change of heart, so that like Jesus, we too can, on our own cross on Calvary, be able to say - “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  

Seeing familiar things in new ways so that we see the unfamiliar.

Back in 1991, a gentleman named Tom Baccei published a book that featured pages and pages of apparently weird and puzzling pictures in multicolor and titled the book “Your Eyesight Gets Better & Better in a Very Short Rate of Time:  Magic Eye”.  Within a few weeks, this Japanese book became a best seller, and he then published a second book soon after that.

 

The ‘magic’ thing about these prints is that at first glance, you only see a random composite of colors and tend not to make much of it.  But only when you look at these pictures at length, and shift your gaze and focal point to allow the colored dots be rearranged, do we shift the focus and allow ourselves to be moved into the picture, we will be able to see a whole new dimension of the composite of dots and shapes, and a totally new image appears as if out of magic and it astounds the viewer.  I remember being captivated by these images when I was in my early secondary school days, going to the MPH bookstore in Armenian Street, just a short walk from SJI where I was studying, and loved viewing the prints of those magic eye posters.

 

In my scripture and theology studies in the seminary, I learnt how important it is to allow the numerous stories in the bible to reveal deeper levels of importance and beauty.  It is only when we take the time and effort to sit with the stories and let the images speak to us in deeper ways will we uncover the depths and gems that await those who take the time to appreciate the beauty that exists inside of those images and stories.

 

Many things in life need to be handled with same endurance and patience as well.  In our Christian tradition, we have the language of scripture, we have creeds, and most definitely, we have our dogmas, and so many of us struggle to not just understand them, but to explain them to others.  In order to get to its crux and depth, we need to sit with these for a time, and let them speak to us in ways that only they can.  And when we do that, then just like looking at the magic eye prints, their depth and beauty becomes not just real but also compelling and enchanting to us.

 

People who have lost friends or relatives in death ought to do a lot of this as well.  At funeral wakes, it will be not just sentimental but wise to take a chair and sit alone in front of the casket of the deceased, and ruminate about how that person was so alive and live-giving to you when their hearts were healthy and pumping blood through their veins.  When we do that, the power of their lives will become more real and beautiful to us, and that is because we allowed our magic eye to be opened in a new way.  Sometimes, the dead speak much louder and clearer to us than when they were alive. 

Patience is a virtue, and we must never forget this.  Your patience in reading this blog entry required patience, and I hope it has paid off richly.  God bless you as you cultivate the virtue of patience in your life, and may your magic eye see the wonders that God promises us we will see when we enter through the gates of heaven. 

 

Are we only useful when we can physically do something in life?

 There is a common misconception about how we as human beings define usefulness and helpfulness in life.  Many, if not all of us, think that it is only when we can actually do something positive in our actions, or say something brilliant and good, that we are contributing to the goodness in the life of others, or to the world at large.

 

While this may be true in many ways, it makes us almost useless and even a bother in so many different situations in life.  We want to be seen as effective and clever by others, but isn’t it true that so often, when things go awry in the lives of so many people, we fall so far short of brilliance, usefulness and helpful.  Take the example of the demise of someone we know and love.  In the face of the pain and agony of their family and loved ones, there really is nothing we can say to them that can assuage the gaping hole of loss and torment that fills their hearts at that moment.  We put so much emphasis on our activity to present to others our elan and compassion, and we hardly think anything positive in our passivity.  But this is because we do not think that passivity has anything good in itself. 

 

We just have to look at the way that Jesus Christ lived his life during his three years of active ministry as a human being two thousand years ago.  True, while he was alive and in active ministry, he preached both by word and by example.  He healed the sick, exorcised those possessed by evil spirits, multiplied loaves and fish to feed thousands, and raised the dead to life.  St John is clear when he said that if every detail and teachings of Jesus were written down, the world could not contain the books that would be written.  This is found in John 21:25.

 

St John wasn’t just exaggerating something.  He was saying something so true, but so many do not grasp the essence of his words.  St John was really saying that there is an amazing positivity not just in Jesus’ activity, but also in his passivity. 

 

In my experience of a shepherd of souls in my priestly ministry, there are times when I find myself unable to say or do anything to positively show my parishioners that I care for them and their wellbeing.  So many times, I have been physically present at the death bed of the relative of my parishioners, and as they were literally at death’s doorstep, with the ECG machine hardly registering signs of a healthily beating heart, all I could do at that moment was just stand there and sometimes, reach out and hold their weak and cold hands in silence.  I wished I could do more, but at that moment, it was all that I could do.  Was I just being so passive in my silence?  Could I have done more?

 

The most powerful and life-contributing parts of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem was not only when he was talking and moving, and manifesting powerful and amazing miracles in front of his disciples and followers.  The last three days of Jesus’ life was when he was silent, arrested, tortured, handcuffed, put on trial, scourged and finally crucified.  There was no physical activity that was seen in Jesus.  Yet, all that was done to Jesus on those three days leading up to his gruesome death on Calvary were a manifestation of his passivity, and it was this passivity that finally brings the greatest power to the world mired in sin and selfishness – it was the power of life over the seeming unsurmountable power of death.

 

A married couple’s love for each other is beautifully conveyed when love letters are written, or when they say sweet and heartwarming words to one another.  While that is good, there is also the misunderstood power of mere presence to one another, with no words coming out from their mouths.  In times of great torment and agony in life, sometimes words just cannot convey what our hearts are emoting.  These are the times when our silent presence communicates that we care and love the people that we stand before.  Just showing up conveys so much.

 

In those times, it takes tremendous courage to just show up.  The courage of Jesus to show up at the trial and torment of the agony of the road up to Calvary is astounding.  It is to our detriment that we downplay so much in the power of our passivity in life.  We put too much emphasis on the activity of our lives, and when we do this, we miss the power and strength that comes from our passivity too. 

 

I listen to various genres of music, and sometimes, it is the depth of the simple words that strike me as both true and beautiful as well.  One of the songs that does this is the song written and made popular by Ronan Keating, entitled When You Say Nothing at All.  Summarized, the contents of the lyrics convey that there are times in life when we convey our deepest and heartfelt emotions and sentiments when we say nothing at all.  The opening lines are a great revelation of our passivity.  Ronan sings “It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart.  Without saying a word, you can light up the dark.”

 

It’s a nice precis of what this blog entry is trying to say.  We think that it is only by our activity that shows how powerful we are.  But sometimes, the opposite is true.  And in those times, we too say it best, when we say nothing at all.