How do we live out our prophetic calling in life?

 Our Catechism teaches and reminds us that by virtue of our baptism, we are all priests, prophets and kings.  We live out our priestly life by being ministers to the world around us, serving and being humble through our reaching out to the community around us.  Certainly, not all of us are ordained ministers, but the priest without the capital P, is not an ordained being who serves in the sanctuary of the Church. 

 

The term ‘minister’ comes from the Middle English, deriving from the Old French word ministre, originally minister in Latin, meaning “servant, attendant”, which was derived from the word ‘minus’ meaning “less”.

 

In the political realm, this aspect of minister is often, sadly, missing and even ignored.  In many countries, being a minister in the government brings with it a whole lot of privilege and profundity, honor, and are often paid a rather handsome salary.  Many ministers in governments are given the secure protection of police and even secret service.  They are often seen as high-ranking beings and are invited to host important events surrounded by press and paparazzi.  There is very little emphasis on the role of a servant or attendant in many ministers in governments. 

 

Yet, this doesn’t change the fact that our Catechism teaches us that each baptized person is a priest, prophet and king.  We are to live out our baptism in humble service of the community that we are in, and to understand that we have a royal dimension in being the children of God our creator and shepherd of souls.  This helps us not to be too disturbed and perplexed when we are not persons of status and rank in society.  It is not what our fellow human beings see in us, but more importantly, what our Divine Lord sees in each of us. 

 

The Church teaches us that the prophetic mission of the baptized has to be rooted in the example of Jesus Christ.  He came to proclaim the Good News of salvation and to liberate and free people who were subjected to sin and death.  This was the primary mission of Jesus Christ, but it was not limited to Jesus’ own ministry, but extended with love to his followers as well.  We the baptized are his followers.  Just as the 12 apostles continued Jesus’ work of preaching the Gospel and healing the sick, liberating them from enslavement to sin, this task is also ours to continue.  The moment we do our bit in proclaiming Jesus Christ with our words and in our work, we become prophets.

 

We live as prophets when we first listen to God’s voice speaking to our hearts.  The prophets in the Old Testament were able to convincingly communicate God’s message to the people, because they heard and responded to God’s voice.  Isaiah gives us an example of doing this when he responded to God’s question of “Whom shall I send?  And who will go for us?”  Isaiah courageously responded “Here am I.  Send me!”  (Is 6:8).  This shows a brave willingness to answer God’s call, despite the fact that it would lead him out of his comfort zone, and this is at the heart of what it means to be a prophet.

 

Living out our prophetic calling in life is never going to be a bed of roses.  Actually, it is, when the bed of roses includes the thorns as well as the flowers.  The phrase isn’t a “bed of rose petals”. 

 

Speaking the truth doesn’t come without its challenges.  It is also a call to be able to confront the evils of the world.  When we speak out against the sinfulness and wanting to transform society, it will in most cases, have us meet with unpopularity and being uncomfortable.  Effective prophets do not fear resistance, opposition and even hostility.  We need to be mindful that Jesus warned his disciples that they would be like “lambs in the midst of wolves” (Lk 10:3).  The true Christian prophet may not be spared suffering, but Jesus assures his disciples that they will be given every necessary grace and strength to be able to carry out the mission God gives them.  Sts Peter and Paul are stalwart examples of lives that can be plagued with sufferings and afflictions when being prophetic in their roles as disciples of Jesus.

 

 Many Catholics have not heard the emphasis on the prophetic role of a baptized person.  It isn’t hard to imagine how badly this will affect the numbers of babies baptized after birth if it were.  And because it hasn’t been emphasized, there are very few Catholics who live out their prophetic roles sedulously and courageously. 

 

There are, I am sure, many parents of baptized children who do read my blog on this website.  I am always grateful for this.  My hope is that after reading this, you will try to teach your children about this side-stepped role of the baptized person in the Church, helping to propagate the Good News of God’s great and saving love for the world.

Do our lives get affected by the presence of guardian angels?

 There are many things that our catechism teaches us about God and life.  The book of Genesis makes no qualms about creation and its origins, and that it was God who made them and gives them life to thrive and reproduce.  Of course, the apex of his creation happened when out of soil he made Adam, and from his side, Eve. 

 

The compendium called Catechism of the Catholic Church specifically mentions angels in the life of the Church, stating that the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.  We are also taught that the angels, and that we celebrate the memory of certain angels more particularly, especially St Michael, St Gabriel, St Raphael, and the guardian angels.

 

It also teaches us that beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.  So, this means that from the moment of our birth or baptism, God dispatches a particular angel to guard us on our journey as we live our lives to glorify God.

 

Our belief in angels guarding us in life can be understood by some as God’s real presence in our life.  Do I have personal experiences of angels who have helped me in my dark and dreary moments?  I am blessed to be able to say that I do, and am proud of those moments as they have strengthened my spiritual life in ways beyond my reckoning.

 

I was enlisted to serve my National Service after my ‘A’ levels, and started out like all recruits, with Basic Military Training, otherwise known as BMT.  One goes through all kinds of physical exercises in the first three months of NS, and one of them is the SOC or Standard Obstacles Course.  One of the exercises in this SOC is where we have to climb up a balance beam and at the end of it, jump off the beam and land on our feet, squatting.  It was at this landing part where I found that I couldn’t stand up, and had to sent by speed boat to the main land so that I could go to the hospital to get treated by a doctor.  There were all sorts of tests I had to go through, and after several months, it was ascertained that I suffered from Spondylolisthesis, which is a condition involving spine instability, where the vertebrae move more than they should.  Finally, because of this incident, my fitness grading was immediately moved from A down to E permanently, and I had to undergo physiotherapy and be supported by wearing a brace, much like a corset beneath my army fatigue. 

 

Then, as most of my readers would know, in 2013, I was diagnosed with a very severe cancer of the blood, called leukemia.  It was life-threatening, and the only way I could find some hope was to be able to get a donor of stem cells from someone who matched my human leukocyte antigen, otherwise known as HLA.  The search had to go out to the world, as no matching donor was found locally.  The journey was arduous, and after about 7 tries, one was finally found, and Peter Mui, a truly kind and generous donor, turned out to be from of all places, half the world away in Chicago, Illinois.  Without a matching donor’s providence of his precious stem cells, I would not have had the chance of remission.  Needless to say, the donation worked wonders, and I am now in remission from a very rare strain of leukemia, and I am daily so grateful to Peter for his selfless act of reaching out to save a total stranger in Singapore.  And the most interesting thing about him is that the day that he signed up to be a bone marrow donor was the day right after I was ordained a priest here in Singapore.  To show my gratitude to Peter, I gave him a watch that my grandfather gave me, and asked an engraver to etch some words at the back of the watch face.  It reads “Time given for the gift of time.”  Peter wears this watch daily now.

 

Lastly, most of you will know that in May 2021, I was exercising outside of the parish in the early hours of the morning when I was hit by a van, and it sent me careening onto the road, and my head was injured, leaving a cracked skull, needing a prosthesis to cover my brain.  The recovery from that accident was arduous, and I am still suffering some degree of weakness as I cannot now go for long runs. 

 

In all of these three moments of being close to death, I was never fearful, but full of hope.  I was glad to be suffering from leukemia, so that I can now tell cancer patients receiving chemotherapy that I know what they are going through because I have had a similar experience myself.  In those moments of afflictions, I was always cognizant of God’s presence in my life, and that I was guarded by his Divine presence. 

 

Angels do not leave us in our lives.  We may not be able to detect their presence, but that doesn’t mean that they are absent from us.  Angels help us to live our lives in ways that glorify our Beloved Creator, God.  We should show our gratitude to these angels by constantly thanking God for them in our lives, that we have them as our guiding lights to show us to path that leads us to our heavenly home after our time on this earth ends. 

 

As Ronald Rolheiser once said, God is closer to us that we are to ourselves, and God’s solicitous love, guidance and protection are with us always.  God is indeed omnipresent.    Praise be to God.

Do we choose our vocation, or does our vocation choose us?

 I do believe, as some spiritual writers have written, that God gives each of us a vocation to live out.  In Roman Catholic spirituality, Fr Ronald Rolheiser says that we were put on this earth with a divine plan for us.  In that light, one question would be “how do we see vocation in this light?”  Well, in discerning our vocation, we need to see it as something that we give ourselves over to, and in very many cases, that comes at a price, and the price is that of having to renounce our own dreams and passions.  We need to be free to accept it or not, but each choice has its consequences.  The last thing we would ever want is to be accused of having to make the choice to live a misdirected and misguided life.

 

I have this thought of my vocation largely because a couple of weeks back, on 20 June, I celebrated my 23^rd sacerdotal anniversary, because it was on 20 June 2001 that I was ordained a Catholic priest at my ordination to the priesthood in the parish of St Anne’s. 

 

Anniversaries tend to give us reason to ponder and appreciate in a new way how we are living our lives.  I am certain that married couples would annually think seriously about how they have lived out their marital vows, bringing back to mind the ways they have made the effort to vow to love each other, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death separates them for good. 

 

It should not surprise anyone that in our present world, there is a culture that permeates everywhere, that there is a belief that personal freedom is the aspiration of everyone.  I recall fondly how my own father responded to me when I asked him if it was alright with him if I entered the seminary to pursue my desire to become a priest.  He asked me why I wanted to do this, and I said that deep inside of me, I believe that God is calling me to become a priest and going to the seminary will help me to find out if this is truly God’s calling.  This was what dad told me:  “Well, it’s better that you go into the seminary to find this out for sure, because if you don’t, you may live to the age of 50 or 60, and find yourself asking the same question, and by then, it would be too late for you to do anything about it.”.  And he closed his response by assuring me:  “Remember – if you find out that this is not for you, just pack up and come home.  The door is always open to you, and you will always be welcome home.”

 

Each year on the anniversary of my sacerdotal ordination, I always fondly recall those reassuring words from my father, who has already passed away.  And I find myself smiling to myself, that I had the courage to ask for the blessing of my parents to enter the seminary. 

 

Of course, the training of the seminary years was not a walk in the park.  Okay, sometimes it did seem like a park – Jurassic Park.  But I will say that I truly enjoyed the discipline of the seminary system and the way that each day was planned out for us.  Examinations were a regular part of the life of a seminarian, and I once calculated that in our 7 years of seminary training, we went through a gamut of around 70 different examinations, ending with a mammoth examination for the Baccalaureate of Theology, taken in the seminary in Penang, West Malaysia.

 

It was James Hollis, a Jungian therapist, who said that vocation is a summons of the soul.  He also says that it is as if we were sent to a land with a royal assignment, and if we dithered or forgotten the task, then we would have violated our reason for being where we are in life.  Painful as it sounds, there is deep truth in that. 

 

What I am certain of is this – at the end of our lives, when we stand before our divine judge, we will hear Jesus say whether we have lived out our God-given vocation.  At that moment, we will know for certain if we have given the best of our lives to what God had planned for us from the moment of our creation. 

 

Heaven and the eternity that will be lived out in heaven will be a time to celebrate the mercy and love that only God, the giver of life, can give a soul.  There will be an endless experience of joy and peace in our hearts when we know that we had fulfilled what God willed for us in life. 

 

Ultimately, it’s not so much that we choose our vocations, but that because our vocations have chosen us, the two choices merged and harmonized in our lives. 

 

It will be a sad experience to know at the end of our lives that we had wasted our lives because we chose only what our hearts desired, all because we prized our freedom more than anything else. 

 

May God be with all of you who are discerning your vocation now, and for those who have already made their choice of vocation in life, may you find the joy and happiness that only God can give. 

How can we pray when we find nothing to say to God in prayer?

 From our youngest days as baptized Catholics, we have been taught that prayer needs to be something that finds an important and indispensable place in our daily lives. 
 
Going to Mass every Sunday was instilled into us as a weekly obligation, and we made no resistance to following our parents to Mass on Sunday mornings.  Yes, it was (and will always be) ritualistic, and we got used to the routine of the Mass and its varied parts of worship and prayer.  We knew when we had to kneel, when to sit, when to stand, and at various times of the Mass, when to strike our breast with our fists.  We made no bones about it. 
 
And soon, we learnt about the beauty and importance of going to the Adoration Room to visit the reserved Blessed Sacrament in the holy place.  We were taught to pray the Rosary, and we very often would pray the rosary in the Adoration Room, and soon also incorporated praying the Divine Mercy there too.  And of course, we were taught how to pray to Jesus for his divine assistance to help us to go through the challenges and trials of daily life, like when we faced stressful examinations in school, when choosing where we should go for pursuing our degree in Universities, or when we are afflicted with traumatic illness.  And the truth is that so many of us are always plagued with such challenges and difficulties in life.
 
The big question comes when we find ourselves running out of things to say to God in our prayer life.  Recently, someone came to me and asked me if she should continue going to the Adoration Room if she has nothing much to say to God that he doesn’t already know.  She has brought to God all her difficulties and afflictions in life, and God has helped her in so many ways, and she is grateful for his help and mercy.  But she’s now running on empty, and her mind is a blank when she enters the Adoration Room and finds that prayer time is beginning to be a waste of her time.  She needed new help in wanting to continue to go to the Adoration Room.
 
I am by no means a mystic.  I do not have an endless supply of wisdom that opens up new areas in the hearts and minds of the sheep of the Good Shepherd that I am to pastor in the parishes I am sent to.  But I did bring this question to prayer, and from my questioning, came the clear and simple answer to this person’s question about prayer and adoration.  And the answer lies in presence.
 
The beauty of the Adoration Room is that Jesus is truly there in the exposed Blessed Sacrament.  And the reason he turned the bread into his body was so that we the faithful could always be sustained and fed by this miraculous bread in Holy Communion.  But there is a deeper reason why he did this – it was because he loves us so much.  Love is the reason we are able to receive Holy Communion at Mass. 
 
If love is the reason for his presence in the Blessed Sacrament, then love should also be the reason we go to the Adoration Room to expose our love for God.  Of course, we can bring our needs and desires to Him in these holy places, but those are secondary in importance.  Love exposed needs to be responded to by love. 
 
So I told the lady who came to see me that our prayer, whittled down to its most basic core, has to be that we love Jesus.  Just look at the way that people in love spend their time together.  Of course, at first, the conversations would be around how they spend their days, and what they find interesting and even riveting in life.  But as the relationship grows through time, these things that people talk about will become less and less, and the majority of the time would be spent in just being in each other’s presence, where love is communicated through their presence to each other.  The very sight of each other will bring the joy that they find lovely and irreplaceable.  When there are no more words to communicate the love they share, their presence conveys what comes deepest from their hearts.
 
This truth needs to be replicated in the Adoration Rooms all over the world.  And I think that the majority of Catholics have yet to come to this fact of our love relationship with God.  He is there waiting in all Adoration Rooms all around the world.  The Divine Lover of all time is there waiting to love us, and so many of us are finding so many other things far more interesting than going to the Adoration Rooms.  That is why so many Adoration Rooms are empty most of the day.  The lover is left alone, much like he was as he was nailed and crucified on Calvary more than 2000 years ago.
 
So, it shouldn’t worry people when they have run out of things to say to God when in prayer.  Just physically going to the Adoration Rooms and sitting silently and wordless most of the time is a pure act of love.  It is the time where we can bring our presence to the Real Presence of Jesus.  The height of love is when lovers no longer have words to say to each other, but just stand with each other, looking at each other in love, and communicating through their presence their unbounded love for one another. 
 
Do not let your inability to find things to talk about be your reason to stop going to the Adoration Room.  Instead, let this uncomfortable silence be the reason we are sustained in our visits to the Blessed Sacrament, because it purifies our love for the Divine Lover, Jesus Christ.  It’s no longer about how good we feel that we go to prayer.  Instead, it is about how much love we convey to God through our very presence in God’s Divine Presence. 
 
Let love be the reason we go to prayer.  This will change the way we pray, and the way we look at prayer in life.