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.
 

When the feeling inside of us is exhaustion, boredom and frustration, our prayer at these times should be the reason and purpose of our prayer.

 I recall with some fondness the rigor and system that outlined the life of the seminarian in the seminary when I was a seminarian studying for the priesthood.  That was a time of 8 years of my life, and it started when I was a 28-year-old man. 

 

I would imagine that when people hear me saying that I appreciate the routine and strict time table of the seminary, they would conclude that I had to be crazy and out of sorts.  In Singapore, National Service is mandatory for all men, and without a doubt, routine and following orders is just part and parcel of the life of being either in the Army or the Navy, or even of the Police Force.  The Army, Navy or the Police Force would be a complete failure if the soldiers, sailors or constables were people who were undisciplined and hardly followed the orders of their superiors. 

 

One of the things that made me appreciate with great gratitude the routine and discipline of the seminary was that they put in us seminarians the need to exercise routine in the life of prayer.  Each morning, whether we felt like it or not, we were expected to turn up in the chapel for Lauds, which is the morning prayer part of the Divine Office, at the quiet and seemingly ungodly time of 6am.  Some seminarians would be seen yawning and sleepy eyed as they turned up for Lauds, which was followed by Holy Mass.  But it was instilled in us as part of our formation, that prayer is the heart of the vocation of the priesthood and religious life.  And this, in effect, meant that no matter how we felt in our hearts, the practice of prayer needs to be upkept and practiced with routine and habit. 

 

If we were free to turn up for Lauds and Vespers (or even Holy Mass) only when we felt like praying, there would most likely to be disaster in the priesthood.  To stretch the point, priests would only go for their hospital visits when they felt like it.  The needs of the people would not be placed at a position of prominence in their life and time table.  The call to passionate service would not be part of their psyche and spirit, and the priest would easily end up chiefly serving themselves and their hearts.

 

I write today’s reflection because I fear that there are quite a few of our faithful who are only praying when they feel like it.  I don’t know if it is because of ill-planned catechesis of their catechists, but that can explain why so many Adoration Rooms in churches are often, left empty and ignored most of the time in the day.  As a priest, I find this very sad and even if we place large posters and placards outside of these Adoration Rooms that Jesus is waiting for us behind the doors of these rooms, the numbers going in to pray and adore God would still not change much.  Unless we place a sentence on the posters something like “Jesus wants you to go inside the Adoration Room regardless of how you are feeling in your heart and mind”.

 

And that is the truth.  Prayer must not be dependent on how we are feeling in our hearts.  The first motive to pray when we first become aware of the grace of our baptism, is to pray because we are so delighted that God loves us so much that through Baptism, we became the sons and daughters of Almighty God himself.  However, these first fervors of prayer do not last for long.  It is a matter of time that this immense and undeserved truth of our being loved and saved becomes something no longer thrills and delights us.  We begin to take our salvation for granted, and once this happens, we taper off our desire to enter into the church or prayer room and turn instead to other things that delight and thrill our easily distracted hearts and minds.

 

The regularity of prayer and adoration must not depend on our feelings and excitement to commune with Jesus our Savior.  Sometimes we are filled with irreverence and our emotions are angry or revengeful, or even filled with thoughts of sexuality and worldly delights.  If this describes our hearts now, then go into prayer and pray those thoughts of irreverence, pray those angry emotions and yes, even pray those sexual thoughts.  Do not wait for only those moments when our hearts and minds are no longer distracted and filled with sin to pray to God.  Real prayer is when we lift our minds and hearts to God.  Real prayer is not contingent on the good things that fill our minds and hearts. 

 

Prayer needs to be cultivated as a habit, not unlike the way brushing our teeth is a habit.  Imagine the outcome of our dental health if we only brush our teeth when we feel like it.  Many, if not most of us, would end up with a whole mouthful of dentures because all of our teeth have rotted away due to poor and non-existent dental hygiene.  Orthodontists would be filled with patients, and so would their bank accounts.  Brushing our teeth regularly and twice a day needs to be indented into our souls with ardor and discipline, and it is for our own good.  Our prayer and prayer life need to be embedded into us so that prayer is not something solely dependent on our feelings, thoughts and emotions.

 

When we have this principle in our hearts, prayer and going for Sunday Mass will become a good and constant habit in us, whether we are in our home country, or when we are away from home due to work or on vacation.  Don’t get me started on the number of times I have heard of penitents in confession who have confessed that they missed Sunday Masses when they were away on vacation in a faraway land.  It’s as if once they have left home, they also leave behind the need to give God glory in and through their lives.  Sadly, it does seem that the love of God is not the primary reason why they are present at Eucharistic Celebrations every Sunday.  Habit, sadly, has not yet been formed in their hearts.

 

One of the things I love about the Psalms that are primary in Lauds and Vespers, is that they are filled with the Psalms from Sacred Scripture.  The Psalms are filled with so many feelings that the human heart may be filled with.  There are Psalms that feature anger, despondency, ill-will, rage and unfaithfulness.  When we are filled with these emotions, it would not be difficult to pray with these words.  These Psalms help us to lift up our hearts and minds to God.

 

Yes, feelings can be the entry point into our prayer life.  But do not let that be the main feature of our prayer life.  God wants whatever is in our hearts in our prayer to him.  If you haven’t developed a regularity in your prayer life yet, start now. 

 

It is never too late to start the habit of prayer regardless of how we feel inside of us. 

Are we really all that anxious as beloved childen of God? If we are, what are we anxious about?

There are many phrases that are found in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and perhaps it is because we hear it so often, we pay scant attention to what they really mean and even imply.  Of course, it is sad when this happens, because it means that we are not paying full attention to the words that make up the Liturgy of the Mass.  What is it that I am referring to in particular?  It is a phrase found in the embolism, which is a short prayer said or sung after the Lord’s Prayer.  In the Roman Rite of the Mass, the embolism is followed by the doxology.

 

In the less literal or more informal English translation used prior to 2011, it reads:

 

Deliver us, Lord from every evil, and grant us peace in our day.  In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

 

And in the Tridentine form of the Roman Missal, the embolism doesn’t feature the word ‘anxiety’, but we find the phrase ‘keep us safe from all disquiet.’

 

One can easily miss the feature of the word ‘anxiety’, and it happens easily because so many people go so frequently to Mass that it doesn’t strike them as important to wonder why the Church sees it important that God keeps us from anxiety. 

 

Essentially, the Church sees the reality that a very large percentage of the human population suffers from a neurosis that sees us always striving to earn our place in God’s grace and that our names are safely written in the halls of Heaven. 

 

Many of us live as though in the deep recesses of our being, God may one day look on this earth, and with genuine surprise, see that you or I are actually still existing, and may even acclaim in genuine surprise: “My divine breath is taken away!  He/she is still alive!  I had completely forgotten about him/her!”

 

The harsh truth is not that we have fallen off from God’s divine radar screen, but there is a nagging truth that we are in a constant, restless and unending worry that our lives are forgettable.  We hanker after wanting to leave a legacy of permanence.  We strive to be special, and we want to make a mark in the world through our lives, and will not stop in attaining greatness in the financial world, and that our words and our lives will always be remembered by the people we touch and encounter in life. 

 

But that financial security, or that greatness that we strive to attain will never reach a point that we can safely say that “it is the end”.  This neurosis can be summed up in one word that is in the Embolism prayer that the Priest celebrant utters after praying the Lord’s Prayer.  And that one word is “anxiety”.

 

Our greatest fear lies in the horror that after we die and meet our divine judge, that we have been forgotten by God.  This anxiety is the opposite of faith, and it is the opposite of believing in God.  When we whittle away all the externals and trimmings of our lust for success, we are deeply unsettled because we are fearful that the God who gave us our lives, our desires and our personal talents, has not placed our names in heaven. 

 

Coming to this realization is the “a-ha” moment that I wish every baptized person humbly strives for.  But it won’t happen by just reading this blog reflection of mine.  It’s a painful and humbling process that can require the need of a good spiritual director and a guide for souls. 

 

Jesus tells his disciples to not be afraid, and that everything hidden will be shown and everything that is secret will be made known – Luke 12:2-3.  Our lives have enough trouble on their own, so we really do not need to have this anxiety in our hearts. 

 

Perhaps deep inside of us, there is this nagging fear that we are not loved, or worse, lovable.  We strive to earn this by our works.  We need to stop making an assertion of our lives and our talents and skills to prove anything, because God will prove it for us.  We only need to fall into the divine and loving hands of God, and Jesus’ main task in his ministry was to show the people he ministered to how special and loved they are to God, his heavenly father. 

 

Having read this reflection of mine in this blog, it is my hope that from now on, each time at Mass we hear the celebrant uttering the words of the Embolism after the Lord’s Prayer, we will be acutely attentive to our hearts and be sincere in praying that God will truly protect us from all anxiety. 

 

This way, when at the end of the Mass we hear the celebrant say “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”, we will respond with great confidence “Thanks be to God!”

OUR NECESSARY GETHSEMANES IN LIFE

Without a doubt, the majority of the human population fears death.  And we are not just talking about that moment when our hearts stop beating and all our human biological connections are no longer working.  That would be death with a capital D.  The death that I am referring to concerns all the little deaths that all of us are called to die to while our biological systems are still well connected and working to keep the body physically alive. 

 

It can be easily summed up by calling it the death to the self.  And this is experienced when we make that conscious effort to die to the sinful or temporary pleasures that we often take delight in in life.  It consists primarily of the death of the ego and the false self which so many of us partake in and don’t often think about seriously in our daily life.  That never-ending and relentless lust for something as material as a branded luxury item, like a pair of shoes, or a sparkling gem in the shape of a ring or a bracelet, or a sportscar with an unpronounceable name like a Buggati Veyron or a Ferrari Spider.  It could even be a meal at some Michelin rated eatery that gives one a smile of unending delight, perhaps costing as astronomical as a thousand dollars per diner.  And it doesn’t even have to be something that costs an arm and a leg.  Even lust for a juicy beef burger in a fast food outlet can give a person that same kind of ecstatic delight.  Saying a conscious ‘no’ to these treats is itself an experience of the death that I am referring to.  Of course, right after saying ‘no’ to these temptations doesn’t spare one the nagging and constant thoughts of ‘what if’, wondering how it would feel if one actually made the commitment to splurge that gigantic amount of hard-earned money and made the purchase to obtain the rights to own that merchandise or experience the delights of that exorbitant meal. 

 

In the New Testament, there are about 33 bible verses that have Jesus mention the need to take up our cross and to follow him.  In Mark 8:34, Jesus even goes on to mention the need to deny oneself in life.  Of course, on the Via Dolorosa, Jesus literally takes up his cross all the way up to Gethsemane where the Romans used it crucify him, between two others who were crucified with him on that fateful day. 

 

As God, Jesus knows that it is against the grain of our sinful human spirit to deny ourselves in life.  Little children from the moment of their infancy, simply delight in having things their way.  And if they are denied what they want, tantrums and tears will somehow automatically appear on their innocent faces.  When these moments of ‘innocent’ demands are met, the down side is that the child will grow up thinking that it is just their God-given right to have their way in life.  Of course, when the child starts on their journey of catechesis, hearing of his/her catechists teach about the need to learn how to die to the self would be something completely alien to their minds and ears. 

 

Why does Jesus emphasize the need to die to the self and the need to carry our crosses in life?  Is there something so special in dying to the self that Jesus makes it a point to stress this in his teachings?  But if we take a close look at the apogee of his sacred life, it is at his crucifixion on Calvary that just before he breathed his last, he said the words “it is finished”.  What was finished was the purpose of his earthly life.  In his death on the cross, he accomplished what he was sent on earth to do – which was to overcome the power of death by his own death.  All the miracles and demonstrations of his sacred life were nothing compared to what his death on the cross did.  Through his death and resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion, he triumphed over the last bastion of life.  And not only for himself, but for all who are his followers and members of the Church that he founded. 

 

So as we make efforts in life to renounce ourselves and willingly take up our crosses in life, we too become living members of his sacred life and finally, when we breathe our last on this earth, we too can imitate Jesus on the cross, and say with great gratitude and relief, the three words that Jesus himself uttered on the cross of Calvary, “it is finished”.

 

Each time we strive to die to self and become unafraid of the throes of death and suffering, we ready ourselves for that great death of our lives.  I had a very memorable moment of this when I underwent the whole procedure of getting my needed bone marrow transplant to help me to attain remission from my encounter with Leukemia, which was very life threatening back in the year 2013.  I had to undergo several surgeries and each time as I entered the operating theatre, I had to be administered with a combination of Propofol and Fentanyl to be sedated and numbed from experiencing any pain. 

 

Those moments prior to the activation of the drugs are always a delight to me, as I know that I will be in a state of comatose and would not experience the passing of time.  In fact, each time I was awakened by the nurses post-surgery, I asked the nurse how long the surgery took.  Sometimes it was a two-hour long process, but to me, it felt like I happened to just dose off when the surgeon performed a complex operation like removing my hip joint and replaced it with an implant.  I love the fact that so much can happen if I only willingly allow the anesthesiologist to administer those sleep-inducing drugs into my veins.  From a certain angle, it would seem like an experience of death of some form, and I look at it as a literal death to the self.  There is no point in fighting this whole act of being put to sleep, and I know that there are many people who actually are very against the effect of such anesthesia in life.  I like to joking ask my anesthesiologist before the surgery “so, am I getting the Michael Jackson one or the Prince one?” and he smilingly tells me “you’re getting both of them!”  Nothing beats the joy of seeing your anesthesiologist chortle with laughter.

 

All of us need these kinds of mini-Gethsemanes in our lives.  In our Catholic culture, all of us are encouraged to practice the abstinence from meat every Friday, respecting and remembering that on Good Friday Jesus himself went through his agony on the Cross as he made his way up the Via Dolorosa on the streets of Jerusalem.  This once-a-week penance readies us for the other forms of little deaths as we encounter our small Gethsemanes in life.  Ignoring the calls to practice weekly abstinence from meat inoculates us from willingly die to ourselves in other ways in life.  If we ignore this call to penance so habitually, we will end up like those little children whose parents hardly discipline them when they are denied their petty demands and whims and fancies in life. 

 

May the reading of this blog reflection encourage and give purpose to everyone who has taken precious time to read this writing.  And I pray that your efforts in willingly taking up your own crosses in life with a positive act of your will become your necessary practice so that when it comes to that last moment of your physical life on earth, you too, will be ready to say like Jesus, with eyes looking up towards your heavenly goal, those precious three words of final accomplishment – It Is Finished!

 

 

How do we as Christians broach and appreciate the grace of God?

 

The season and time for the penitential services in the archdiocese has just ended, as we are currently in the period called Holy Week.  Twive a year, the Archdiocese organizes penitential services in all our parishes to allow the people of God's church to come and encounter God's mercy and forgiveness through the celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  These celebrations are organized to encourage the congregation to experience God's underserving love and mercy through the forgiveness of their sins which may have kept them away from the Mass.  In the process of the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation, there is a part where the penitent declares when he or she last went for confession.  There is always a tinge of sadness in me as a confessor priest to hear the penitent say that the last time they went for confession was at the last penitential service.  There are only two times a year that these penitential services are held for the congregation - once in Lent, and the other in the period of Advent.

I say 'tinge of sadness' because there is a certain revelation that the experience of God's great mercy and forgiveness is so blatantly missed that the penitent sees no reason why they ought to make confession as regularly as once every month.   Just leave it to the two times when these services are organized.  They obviously must have missed the point, and I do hope that I am wrong, but I dont want them to take God's mercy and forgiveness for granted.

One of the most dangerous and risky things about our human lives is that there is the sad possiblity of being used to sin.  Hard as we try to inculcate a sense of moral righteousness in our poeple, there is a sad prevalance of habitual sin in the lives of so many people.  The sad truth is that some people can be so used to some sins that they are in fact comfortable with being in a state of sin for the most part of their lives.

No canonized saint in the Church's history was a person who was a habitual sinner.  So many of them pursued the virtue of holiness that they were in fact habitual confessors.

Whenever Good Friday comes along, it never fails to strike me that it is on that one Friday in history when Jesus died on the shameful cross on Calvary, that there was a blatant demonstration of how much God loves us, who for the most part, are terrible and unworthy sinners.  Jesus nailed on the cross and suffering so unmistakably was a genuine show of the extent of God's love for his sinful children.  However, the sad truth may be that this fact is so missed and unseen that so many people display the crucifix on their front doors of their homes, but are still mired in habitual sin, forgetting and taking for granted how much God loves us.

Every Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance in an adoration room is Jesus himself, exposed for veneration and serves to remind us all about the extent of God's immense love for his wayward children.  Perhaps the fact that many adoration rooms are often empty and unvisited just shows how little the laity truly appreciate the love and mercy that caused Jesus to transform humble bread into his sacred body for all for their needed spiritual nourishment.

As a priest, this is a clear sign to me that one of my most important tasks as a shepherd of souls is to remind the laity of this incessantly through my preaching and teaching.  I must never tire of this task as it is something that God wills for me to do as a vital part of my priesthood and vocation.  I just pray that the people will never tire of hearing this but instead, change their ways and attitude toward the Lord in his presence in their lives.

It was theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who coined the term 'Cheap grace" when he wanted to highlight the cost of discipleship.  People are accepting cheap grace when they take the grace that God has granted them for granted.  Deeply appreciating the cost of our salvation is one of the hallmarks of a saint.  May less and less people just receive forgiveness from God without repentance.  True gratitude for God's undeserved mercy changes one's life.  Let us live new and profoundly gratitude for God's amazing grace every day of our lives.

Why is Jesus' Ancestry so dysfunctional?

As Christians, we believe that Jesus is God.  This fundamental belief makes it easy for us to accept and follow many things in the Christian tradition, and it includes the many hymns that we hear during Christmas time.  And because we believe that Jesus is God, we also silently have the belief that Jesus’ family tree and bloodline must have been perfect.  However, it was Raymond Brown, the renowned biblical scholar, who said that Jesus’ bloodline was really far from perfect, and we need to reject thoughts that Jesus must have been descended from a line of perfect, scandal-free and bad history.  And this is insightfully true, because there is much in his origins that is rather strikingly jolting, perhaps as shocking as any contemporary church scandal.

 

Within the genealogy of Jesus, the there are in fact many sinners, liars and schemers, like there are in the lives of many of the canonized saints, honest people, and the heroic lives of the men and women of faith.

 

In Jesus’ genealogy, there are a number of men and women who were not the stalwarts of the love, charity, faithfulness and purity of Jesus.  To be clear, there was Abraham who unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, who rationalized that God favors some people over others; and then there’s Jacob who stole his brother Esau’s birthright; and of course, David who committed adultery and then had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite, murdered so as to cover up an unwanted pregnancy David created in order to marry her.

 

And of course, there were the few women named in the genealogy who were remarkable for the wrong reasons.  The gospels don’t mention Sarah, Rebekah or Rachel who were regarded as holy women.  Rather, the following get mentioned – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.    Tamar was a Canaanite woman who seduces her father-in-law so that she can have a child.  Rahab was another Canaanite woman (an outsider) who is in fact a prostitute.  Ruth was another outsider (a Moabitess) and of course, Bathsheba, the woman David commits adultery with who loses her husband when David plans to have him murdered to cover up his secret love affair.

 

Isn’t it interesting to know that these four named women were  either strange or scandalous, yet they paved the way to give us Jesus.  And it is no accident that these four woman are linked to Mary, Jesus’ mother, since she too found herself in a taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was deemed strange and perculiar. 

 

Whenever I get to read the genealogy of Jesus at Mass, I always tend to glace at the congregation to see if there are any shocked or flabbergasted looks as the names of Jesus’ ancestors are read out.  Without a doubt, there would be quite a few faces that are wide awake, but puzzled whenever some names are mentioned, and it is not because of my bad pronunciation of their names.  They know that some of these names are quite simply taboo to be listed in Jesus’ genealogy.  Quite often, I come to the conclusion that they would rather that Jesus come from a perfect and faultless, and scandal-free bloodline.  Yet, the axiom that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is true, even where Jesus is concerned.  There are some of the names in the list that have nary any specialness or significance.  Jesus’ human blood was a result of a mixture of the great and the small, the holy and the not-so-holy as well.

 

The hard truth is that we may have very high standards for Christ.  But there’s a downside to this – we may be forgetting that we too, are also responsible to continue the story of Jesus’ incarnation.

 

Jesus’ genealogy shows that God did not get stopped by the scheming and the scandalous.  God uses the pure and the impure.  This raises our own standards in life for ourselves, because we too, can be usable by God to write his way into the life of this world.  We cannot too easily exclude ourselves from being people who can be effectively used by God to bring his mercy and love into a world that aches and longs for God’s presence in its very existence.  Don’t write ourselves off too easily. 

 

This gives us so much hope.  None of us is too sinful to be used by God to continue the incarnation of Jesus in the world.  God can use us, simple or dysfunctional that we think we are, to bring the presence of Jesus to the world.  And I believe that this hidden truth is a truism that has not been addressed loudly enough to give everyone hope in this life and it should not be a hidden secret kept because of the fear of embarrassment.  If it is, it will be a shame.