Inspired to be inspirational

It is always nice to be inspired in life.  Some companies seize on this desire to be inspired and have even made a nice business out of this by printing inspirational posters so that people reading them can become motivated in life.  You know what I am talking about – they usually feature a very well taken photograph, set within a very thick black border as a background, with a pithy, wise sentence that could read something like ‘Courage – It comes from a reserve of mind more powerful than outside circumstances’.  Reading something like that when your own ‘reserves’ are down can give one a temporary boost of morale when one is facing one's own private little battles.  Indeed, it is always nice to be inspired at these times.

Here tucked away and ensconced in the safety and seclusion of the hospital transplant ward, I have been able from time to time communicate with some friends and former parishioners just to give them some update on my slow state of recovery (which by the way, seems to have turned several positive corners in terms of improvements in blood counts and healing experienced in different parts of the body).  Invariably I have been given words of encouragement and love and support from a huge and unseen community of people who are praying for me.  One of the things that I have heard which puzzled me somewhat was how I have been an inspiration for many of them in their own lives just by my sharing of my pains and struggles to find meaning in suffering and using this as a means of our incessant search for holiness in life.  While I will openly admit that I have always believed (and have written about) in the need for each of us to search for and to attain holiness in life, I have never quite dared to set myself up as anything close to being an inspiration, the least of all when I seem to be at my weakest and least usable physically.  But perhaps this is where what St Paul said really rings true in 2 Cor. 12:10 – where Paul sees the two-fold pattern in the weakness/strength and death/resurrection dialectic which marks the life of an apostle of Christ.  Indeed, if this is so, then there must be something truly (but also silently) powerful in powerlessness when facing something as a debilitating suffering in life.  Right now, I may arguably be the most unusable priest in the diocese of Singapore, with no contact possible between any parishioner and myself, but yet, there seems to be something beyond me and my physicality that can even form and perhaps audaciously even ‘teach’ others.   Strangely, even if I do attain my STL (Licentiate in Sacred Theology) I may not be able to form and teach on such a scale as this.  And this is not at all something of my doing – the ultimate power of God and his mercy is at the helm of this ‘teaching’.  I am greatly humbled when I am given to look at things this way.

It is was with this in mind that I was given to read Fr Ronald Rolheiser’s weekly internet column last week where he wrote so eloquently of our need to give to the poor and become altruistic in life.  It comes from our very being where we participate in God’s own nature, whose very own giving away of himself in love and in death becomes our motivation to also give our wealth away.  Not because we are good, but more importantly because God is good. 

While it is nice to be inspired in life, what is more important is ultimately to be an inspiration for life and to life.  Only when we bear this in mind constantly, or perhaps have it reminded to us from time to time by some inspirational poster, or speaker, or yes, even a person in transplant recovery far from human contact, can we make sense of making the most of our lives by giving our deaths away.  

It is simply because God did this, so must we.