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.