Fighting the need to build tents in our spiritual life.

In all three of the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Luke and Mark, there is an account of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  There is an interesting and rather important part of the event which I believe is very relevant to anyone who is truly interested in developing and sustaining a healthy prayer life – it is when Peter makes a rather strange and seemingly random suggestion to put up three tents or shelters right there on this mountain top.

This suggestion of Peter needs to be unpacked for it to be something that we see ourselves doing in our own spiritual lives and prayer moments.  Peter had the overwhelming need to sustain and freeze in time something that was supernatural.   When Jesus was transfigured, his outer appearance was beyond what was naturally human.  The words that Scripture uses are indicative of this being more than natural – the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzlingly white.  This was the gospel writers’ way of saying that what was beheld, what was experienced, was more than natural, more than normal, more than usual, but in a good way.

What made Peter utter the phrase that he did?  What was he trying to imply and suggest?  More importantly, can we in our prayer life or religious experiences find ourselves having such thoughts and intentions?

Peter in his innocence and naivety was trying to do what so many of us do when we have a very good and pleasant experience in life.  He wanted to preserve and sustain this pleasure.  He didn’t want it to end, or at least have it prolonged in some way.  We find ourselves doing the same thing in different ways, partly because pitching of tents isn’t something that we moderns aren’t particularly adept at.  Our ways of pitching tents in the 21^st century are a bit more sophisticated – we take selfies, we take videos, and we share them on the Internet.  As well, we buy keepsakes and mementoes just so that we can hold on to a great and significant moment, giving the phrase “been there, done that and bought the T-shirt and the mug” something that resonates with a dose of light hearted hilarity.

While doing all that isn’t wrong in themselves, these actions do have a side effect that is inevitable – they rob us of truly experiencing the moment and appreciating fully what the experience is offering us.  So many tourists who go to places of noted interest and fame return home and when they view their photos taken with such dedicated art direction and precision realise that they hadn’t really enjoyed or appreciated the moment while they were there.  It could be a concert, a wedding, a birthday or a meeting of friends.  Wanting this joy and bliss to be somehow preserved causes us to step out of the moment rather to be steeped in it. 

What was perhaps lost on Peter as he made that suggestion was that this experience was given to him for a purpose other than the moment itself.  Otherwise, that episode would have ended right there.  Instead, it continues with them coming down from that mountain the very next day.  Its implication is obvious – that event, which was definitely a moment of supernatural grace, was for the three of them (four, if Jesus is included) to continue on Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem, where he would be delivered into the hands of men.  The Transfiguration was, if you like, a charging station, a spiritual boost, to prepare them for the Passion, which was to come.

Those of us who have gone on retreats often speak about how peaceful and serene the retreat was, and I have personally heard of retreatants lamenting that the experience had to end.  In speaking like this, there is evidently something Peter-ish about this.  Those mountain top experiences, which in spiritual language are also called consolations, serve a purpose other than the moment itself.  They strengthen our faith and grounds our belief in a loving God for a time later, and these are more often than not our own “passion” moments.

I write this reflection as I am sequestered in my priest’s residence recuperating from my surgery to my necrotized hip.  People have asked if I was ok and how I keep myself buoyed during this time of incapacity where I need to use either my wheelchair or crutches.  The answer lies principally in the harnessing of those mountain top experiences in my own prayer life, where I was grounded in the truth of God’s never ceasing and ever abiding love.  This enables me to move and make strides in my journey of life even though I can hardly physically move at all. 

If God is giving you, by his grace, a mountain top experience in life, savour it for all it is worth, and be in the moment.  Hoping that it never ends, or worse, hoping that it will be repeated in a similar way could inadvertently be cramping God’s style.     

The real business of our Christian faith.

The real business and rationale for our Christian faith is not to be rich, successful or powerful in life.  There is a great misunderstanding of the purpose and rationale for our faith and belief in Jesus Christ, which I believe is often the root cause of well-meaning Christians who end up being angry with God.  Christianity’s uniqueness has never been that it gives believers the ability to sidestep challenges and turmoil in life.  Neither is it akin to some sort of ‘fast pass’ or exit ticket out of suffering and pains that are part and parcel of the journey of life.  If this is the way Christianity has been ‘sold’ to us, it was at best done so by misguided salesmen. Christianity was never meant to be a ‘feel good’ religion, but having said that, it is also not a pity-party and a gathering of pessimists who revel in each other’s dolefulness and despondency either.

More and more, I am wont to believe that a major part of what constitutes a healthy spiritual life is to see this reality about Christianity over and over again till we make a breakthrough and emerge as true believers.  Otherwise, we will only remain believers on a nominal and surface level, but cynics in varying degrees on the inside.

There is no special message or preaching that I or any other skilled theologian or spiritual guru can impart apart from the good news that is Jesus Christ, who is God’s greatest show and tell.  He came to show us that God loves us unconditionally, and also to show that this unconditional love is not predicated on being spared from the pains and sufferings that result from a world and humanity that is drenched in sin. 

The whole issue of salvation boils down to how God wants to make us truly adult in facing and dealing with life and all that life presents to us.  It is when we are only childish and infantile in our approach towards life that we fall into despair and end up blaming everybody and everything else for what we are facing in life. 

The world suffers from a very shallow understanding and definition of what it is to be adult.  Often, one’s physical age demarcates when one is adult, and when one has left childhood behind.  We see this most strangely and most clearly where vices are concerned.  To smoke and drink, one has to be ‘of age’.  The same applies entry into gambling halls and places where pornography are available for procurement.  I tend to chuckle internally whenever I come across terms like ‘adult entertainment’, when in truth, there is nothing adult in them at all, when in fact, it is truly childish and shallow titillation that is purveyed.  I wonder if changing the term to ‘childish entertainment’ would change the way the world views pornography, because it is truly false advertising.  There is nothing adult whatsoever in this insidious industry.

When we are truly child-like in our approach and attitude toward God and religion, we become ready to become truly adult as well, and this includes being adult in the way that we face all the ups and downs of life, and take everything in stride as just a part of our being born into a sinful world that needs to learn how to wait – wait for God to slowly reveal himself to us in the very paths our lives are taking.

Some of you may know already that I am going for a surgical procedure called Core Decompression for my other necrotized femur due to the heavy use of medical steroids taken 4 years ago to fight Leukemia.  Most likely, by the time you read this, I should be in hospital ready for the surgical intervention. 

I know that there are quite a number of you out there who look at my attitude with a mixture of incredulity and amazement, when I take these inconveniences as just part and parcel of life.  I am not one for any form of self-promotion, but if it helps to form the faith and lessen the fears of my readers, I am willing to be personal. 

From the moment I was diagnosed with Leukemia, which was truly life threatening, I thanked God for bringing me so close to him on the Cross.  It has since made the sacrifice of my priesthood tremendously real and raised my awareness of what it means to suffer redemptively.  I may not do this as well as I would like to, but it is still a two-steps-forward-one-step-back movement.  Having another human being who was a complete stranger wanting to save me from my impending death made so real how Jesus is my savior from my eternal death.  (Note to Peter Mui, you will ALWAYS have my heartfelt gratitude).  My hope in writing about this and putting this out in this public way is that it can somehow help anyone who is struggling to make sense of pain and suffering in life, and to see that the ability to face such challenges in life is the real ‘business’ of our Christian faith. 

God doesn’t delight in giving us any form of suffering for the sake of suffering.  That God doesn’t exist.  But the God who truly delights in this – having children who desire so much to imitate Jesus who suffered for a cause greater than his – this is the God who is real, and whom we need to approach with a faith that is truly adult in every sense of the word. 

What is the greatest happiness that we can wish for each other in the New Year?

This morning, as we begin the year 2018, the greeting “Happy New Year” will be on our lips.  Apart from it being custom or tradition, greeting each other with this phrase is evocative of a reality that we want to live out and to have live out in the lives of others – that happiness will be evident and experienced in all our lives as we live till the next New Year countdown in 365 days time. 

Different definitions of happiness abound.  Just ask ten people for their definition of happiness and it would be a great challenge to have three people saying the same thing.  For most people, happiness is shaped and defined by what for the most part contributes to their overall well being and state of being anxiety-free.  The definitions of happiness, therefore, are wide-ranging, and often in terms of financial abundance, a plethora of lovers, a freedom from health-issues of any kind, or even sterling results in one’s academic pursuits.  Especially in this day and age of the rise of individualism and relativism, it does seem that anything goes, because the needs of the self and the ego trumps over the needs of others.

For us Christians, it would be a shame if these were our definitions of what ultimately constitutes happiness.  How should our Christian identity then influence our happiness?  Is there a Christian definition of happiness? 

If heaven is our final goal in life as Christians, then it necessarily means that attaining this goal ought to shape and mould all our other life choices and what we give our lives over to.  Anything that distracts us, and misleads us from this final goal would be what distracts us and misleads us from our happiness. 

I am in strong agreement with what Fr Ronald Rolheiser said once in one of this talks that we need a hopeful metanarrative in life, and if this is missing, we can be wishing and wanting so many things in life, but they will inevitably fall flat and taste insipid even when we attain them, simply because they are tangible.  Our hope as Christians is given to us in Christ our Lord, and this ought to be our metanarrative.

What is a metanarrative?  It is an overarching account of events or circumstances that provide for us a structure or a pattern for our life and our life’s experiences.  Jesus’ promise of our resurrection through his own life, death and resurrection gives us our ultimate hope, and this, as Fr Rolheiser so astutely puts it, is a metanarrative that because it is not tangible in this life, has an eternal dimension to it.  It is not only a metanarrative, but it is also meta-life. 

We all know that hope is so important in life, and we see so many people whose lives are either falling apart or have fallen apart simply from the lack of hope. 

When we have a hope that touches eternity in God, it gives us permission.  I am constantly nurturing this hope in my heart in my prayer life and the spiritual disciplines that I keep because I know that it gives me permission for many things that are so hard for most people – it gives me permission to experience disappointments, permission to go through trials and sickness, permission to fail, and most importantly, permission to die.  Why?  Because the end has already be written and confirmed by Christ and his life, death and resurrection.  Those who do not have this healthy metanarrative which is constantly nurtured through prayer and contemplation, will end up being vexed and exasperated when things fall apart in life.  If our metanarrative is only on the tangibles and emotional, there is a good chance that we may be building on sand.  When the storms and floodwaters rise in our lives, the sand gives way to trauma.  Many countless lives can be spared this trauma if only they came to know the good news of Christ. 

Jesus had a great vision that all of humanity would understand this, and would benefit from his ultimate sacrifice on the Cross for us.  That is why he had the great commission to make disciples of all nations. 

I think most of us have a rather hard time making this important connection – for ourselves and for others when we try to evangelize.  If this is not at the heart of our efforts, we easily end up either being too pedantic or giving a message that has a hollow ring to it, where those listening to us fail to see the message’s connection to life because we have not made the connection ourselves.

It could start with just a change of the way we greet one another as 2018 begins.  Yes, we all want a Happy New Year, but it may just pique the interests of others when we wish them a Hopeful New Year instead, and let that pave the way to share what gives us the greatest hope.

May the hope of Christ be yours in abundance throughout this year.

Thoughts on Christmas Day

It has been said quite aptly and theologically correctly that God may save us unilaterally, but he chooses to respect our decision to want to cooperate and accept this great un-deserved offer of salvation with our free will.  All attempts at explaining why there is evil in the world despite there being a God who loves and wants to save ultimately comes back to this principle. 

Christmas is a lavish display of how small God is willing to be and the extent he goes to show his love for us.  He diminishes himself in order for us to be engulfed and enveloped by his mercy and love, the effects of which are not unlike how an earthquake caused by the slight shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates miles below the surface of the ocean may result in the tremendous force of a tsunami later on.  The only difference is that unlike a tsunami which causes untold amounts of chaos and destruction, this tsunami of God’s love that began as a tiny spark in the womb of Mary, is set to become the tidal wave of love that wants to wash over and envelope the entire human race in order for it to truly live, grow and flourish.

Tsunamis don’t give you a choice.  Tsunamis do not respect anything.  Everything it is path is obliterated and subject to its tremendous force.  This is where the syllogism ends.  God’s love, incarnate in Jesus Christ at Christmas, gives us a lot of room for choice and is utterly respectful of human freedom.  The only thin God’s love is interested in obliterating and rendering powerless are the effects of evil and sin.

Looking that the infant Jesus at Christmas, it hardly invites us to consider this aspect of Christianity’s awesome reality.  We are too easily distracted by the bucolic sentiments that surround the Christmas crib or Nativity scene.  This is the wonder of Christmas, which seems to be easily missed by the millions throughout the world who observe Christmas with nostalgia or a “happy holiday” event.

I’ve written reflections in the past on my sentiments about celebrating Christmas merely on a superficial level with it being a mere holiday event, or wishing each other the non-descript greeting of “compliments of the season”. 

It could be because I’m getting on in years, or it could be that I am beginning to truly believe that God does write straight with crooked lines that I am not so uptight about these things as I was in my more earnest and younger days as a priest of God.  As longa s one isn’t a naysayer, or an outright atheist who angrily dismisses the existence of a loving God, but if one allows goodness to thrive and promotes this in and through one’s being, I am convinced that there is really no saying how much God can do to enlarge one’s heart from a spark of goodness within.

This was something that dawned upon me recently when I was visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral in the city of Paris, France.  I was blessed to be able to vacation in the city, and went into the church one day for my evening prayer, also known as Vespers, the official prayer of the Church.  This Cathedral is probably on every visitor’s must-see list, and that evening, Notre Dame was really ‘packing them in’.  I joined in this long queue in the cold winter night air that made its way past security to enter the nave.

The Catholic Priest in me made an immediate beeline to the Blessed Sacrament chapel, which was not really easy to locate.  I had to encircle the nave twice before I realized that I had passed it on my initial attempt. 

When I had completed praying Vespers, still seated in my pew, I realized that all the while that I was praying there, I was the only one in that small chapel.  Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands of tourists were walking around with mouths agape, some craning their necks to take in the awe-inspiring interior of this behemoth of a church.  Others had their noses buried in their guidebooks, taking selfies, chatting with one another, and some had their earphones in their ears that provided a guided commentary explaining the features and significance of what they were seeing.  But for the most part, they simply filed past the Blessed Sacrament, oblivious to the fact that the true awesomeness of the Cathedral lay not so much in the physical structure of the building, but that the Lord himself is truly present there in the Tabernacle of that Chapel.

“Was God offended with what was happening?” I asked myself quietly.  Probably not.  He took a great chance at Christmas to come to us in such a hidden and under-appreciated form – a tiny infant that was so dependent on human care.  This was something so easily bypassed by anyone walking by that manger in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone then if people are strolling by a Blessed Sacrament chapel in something as majestic as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris if they too pass him by once again. 

It’s probably a macrocosm of what has been happening all over the world, what with Christmas being celebrated as a holiday more than as a holy day. 

The first persons to hear the message of the truth of the Bethlehem baby were shepherds.  As a priest of God, I too, am a shepherd, and I see with a renewed vision my task to bring God’s love in a new and real way to those who in life are like those thousands of tourists in the Notre Dame – looking but not really seeing, and living lives oblivious to the fact that God is indeed in the world and among them.

As you read this, dear reader, I wish you a most blessed Christmas, and may real Christmas joy be in your heart.