Homilies of a Jesuit

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

2012-01-15T01:33:00.000+08:00

We move into Ordinary Time and very immediately the focus is on vocation orcall and response. In the first reading, we get a glimpse of the vocation ofthe prophet Samuel. The Gospel gives detailed descriptions of both the call andresponse of the first apostles.

What does it mean to be called and how are we to respond?

Calling is not something which happens out of the blue. In fact, creationmay be said to a response to God’s calling. He called and all reality, visibleand invisible, came to be. That could be considered the most basic response toGod’s calling. However, creation, especially Man, the pinnacle of God’screation, is imbued with freedom. With freedom, morality maps Man’s freedom torespond to God or not.

Today, it would be good to reflect on how we can sometimes unknowinglyreject God and maybe understand what it means to respond.

Let us begin with a phenomenon known as lapsed Catholics. I am sure youwould have come across people who are classified as non-practising. It is by nomeans a phenomenon restricted to Catholicism. All religions have their fairshare of it. I once had a conversation with a lapsed Catholic and the reasongiven for being lapsed was that she was disgusted with how poorly people livedtheir faith.

Disgust may be a strong word. Perhaps discouragement would be a betterdescription.

For example, each year we attract about 100 people for RCIA and give ortake the falling out, we might baptise about 80. Statistically, this parish mayhave the most baptism in the Archdiocese every year and it is a fact that mightjust swell us with pride.

However, the call to discipleship frequently has a kind of trajectorythat starts off with euphoria. But, when the euphoria dies down, then mundanereality of Catholic life sets in. This is the time when the neophyte willencounter real Catholics in whom they will observe a huge gap between what ispreached and what is practised. The result may be a faith shattering dejectionand soon enough a cause for staying away from the Church. But this phenomenonis not restricted to neophytes because many cradle Catholics do the same whenthey cannot reconcile the difference between preaching and practising.

Thus far, I have described a reason for arriving at lapsed Catholicism.To be fair, the reason is not illogical. In Confession, we examine ourconscience and ask if we have caused a scandal by our actions or omissions. Theetymology of the word scandal is an obstacle meaning that by our action orinaction we have caused people to stumble in their faith. An example ofstumbling in faith is what you may have heard uttered ad nauseam—the Church isfull of hypocrites.

But, many people also do not realise that the reason for lapsing isreally a sorry excuse for the abdication of responsibility. What they aresaying is that that they will be Catholics only if others behave. Perhaps, inthe context of God’s call and our response, let me rephrase the phenomenon oflapsing as, “Hey God I don’t like you and I don’t want to be your friend. Why?Because these people are bastards”. Crude as it may sound but it gets the pointacross. What sort of response is that?

The call that God has for us, is a call that is personal to us. Everyoneis personally called into relationship with Christ the Son. Through theSacrament of Baptism each one is grafted onto the Vine, called Jesus Christ,Our Lord and God. By our baptism, our response to Him is lived out bothpersonally and corporately. Personally because only the individual can respondand corporately, because we realise that nobody can on his or her own grafthimself to the Vine. No one baptises himself. It always happens through theagency of another which makes the grafting process corporate in its nature. Thenature of God’s call which is corporate is otherwise known as Church. Church isnot something extraneous to calling but it is essentially a component of thatcall and also necessary for salvation. This is where we differ with Protestantsbecause for them, personal faith is often restricted to an “individual’s”response. For Catholics, our personal response has a corporate structurebecause salvation comes through the Church. It is through her that Christ’ssacraments come to us. We cannot accept the head who is Christ and reject His Bodywhich is the Church.

This corporate nature of God’s call makes possible the baptism ofchildren because the faith of the parents may supply for the child’s lack offaculty in making personal decision. Parents have a grave duty to form thechild to become responsible personally for the faith which they first receivedfrom their parents. At a wider circle, it means also that we need to have agreater sense of responsibility to nurture each other’s faith because by ourbehaviour we may encourage or discourage our brothers and sisters.

Having said all that, still it remains that our response to God ispersonal. The Sacrament of Confirmation is at times described as the momentwhen the faith of our parents becomes our personal response. Some of our youthsseem to graduate from Sunday School and Confirmation to non-practice. Itexplains but does not excuse an inability to take personal responsibility forone’s response to God. To a certain extent, part of the blame will lie on theparents IF they did not in the first place train the child for that moment ofresponsibility. But, the failure to be personally responsible cannot be derivedfrom the corporate expression of God’s call meaning that one cannot blame one’sparents or others forever. You may blame someone sometime but not all the timebecause after blame comes personal responsibility for a situation, no matterhow dire.

In summary, faith is a personal response to God but always livedcorporately through the Church. Maybe, at the beginning of the year, whenresolutions are baking out of the oven fresh and aplenty, we might resolve to deepenour response to God, that is, to live our faith personally and independently ofother people’s practice or lack of, but always within the bosom of Holy Mother,the Church.

Epiphany Year B

2012-01-06T01:36:00.000+08:00

Let me begin by defining what the Epiphany is. It is the Solemnity of themanifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or put it in another way, it is theunveiling of the Christ to a world longing for its Saviour. Thus, the readingsspeak of God’s revelation to the Jews through Sacred Scriptures whereas theGentiles will discover God through nature. The Jews in exile are encouraged bythe Prophet Isaiah with a vision of a Jerusalem restored; a prophecy which isfulfilled by Christ and in the New Israel, the Church. The Three Wise Men wereGentiles and Matthew showed them as receiving God’s revelation throughastrology. In revealing to both Jews and Gentiles, Epiphany is also aninvitation to communion with Him and one another. In a nutshell, apart fromsalvation and worship, the Epiphany is a call to communion.

Epiphany, in fostering communion, shares its intent with a phenomenon weall know as social-networking. Today, I would like to speak of whatimplications social-networking may have on Epiphany’s invitation to communion.

The ontological reason for the Epiphany is because the human person ismade in the image and likeness of a Trinitarian God. What does that mean? Sincewe are made in His image and likeness, it means that we must be “worth God’swhile” to manifest Himself to us. The corollary would mean that theorganisation of our lives must reflect this God whose image we are moulded in. Otherwisewhy would God reveal Himself to us?

One of God’s attribute is holiness which again means that we are supposedto reflect holiness for without it, we are no better than an intelligent primate.Our quest to be is a quest for holiness for without it, we would become eitherindividualists without a sense of “direction” or we are reduced to collectivewhole without a personal centre. Individualists of a senseless kind are thosewho live lonely self-destructive lives or a collective of an impersonal kindare those who live without any self-reflexion. We call this herd-mentality.

What has Face-book, a form of social networking to do with this? Firstly,let me make it clear that Face-book is amoral in the sense that in itself, itis a neutral[1].Its morality is derived through our use of it. In itself, it is an excellentcommunication platform. But hidden within its use is a dark shadow because weare innocently drawn into hyper-sharing because we assume that we belong incommunion. Well, that may be the case that we are already in communion but, theneed for everyone to know what we do, where we are or where we go, could maskan invitation to the new temple of the Narcissist. It is a kind of individualismin full bloom.

The temptation to individualism grows stronger the more we experiencefragmentation in our lives. In a fragmented world, the youths have only a vaguesense of the whole without a sense that the whole is interconnected or to putin a familiar term, the whole is in communion.[2]For example, the drinking of water from bottles. We are not unaware of how muchwater is wasted when half-drunk bottles are discarded. It is ironical that thepresent generation is trying to save the sharks for a generation which does notappreciate how much plastic flows into the ocean. This is what I mean by livingfragmented lives.[3]

Whilst the world outside continues to deteriorate, that is, gets morefragmented, fear drives us to seek refuge behind our gated communities or into thesafe cocoon of what we can control. From the loneliness of our bubble, we tryto reach the world through social-networking but instead of reaching the world,the world comes to watch us star in our movies.

Let me reiterate that face-booking is not bad in itself but social-networkingeven though it contains the word “social” is often narcissistic because it makes us forget who we are. We are made inthe image and likeness of a God who is social in the truest sense of the word. Why?Because God is Trinity and therefore, God’s holiness is a holiness of communion.In the Epiphany, we are introduced to the fullness of the individuality andcollectivity we yearn for because the true individual is always in communion—acommunion which prevents us from selfish individualism; a communion whichSacred Scripture would describe as a cloud of witnesses or communion of saintsor holiness.

Finally, we are challenged to ask if the Epiphany is really God’suniversal revelation of Himself through Jesus His Son or have we succumbed to anarcissistic world where the phenomenon of social-networking makes Epiphany amanifestation of ourselves to God? In this narcissistic world, God comes toworship us. Thus, the relevance of the Epiphany may be lost to us especially whensocial-networking is really an avenue to an enclosed world where we have becomethe centre of attention. The revelation of God to the Gentile world reminds usotherwise. The world comes to worship the God who saves.

[1] Just like gambling or alcohol in themselves.

[2] Facebook tempts us with pseudo-communion.

[3] Fragmented young people want a worldoutside which is peaceful so that they can grapple with the internal conflictswhich to themselves seem intractable. They are unable to grasp a biggerpicture.

Solemnity of Mary Holy Mother of God Year B

2012-01-01T23:36:00.000+08:00

1^st Jan marks the Octave of Christmas. Today is 8 days afterChristmas. Every liturgical year, the Church celebrates two Octaves: Christmasand Easter. In some countries, 1^st Jan is also a Holy Day ofObligation. The Solemnity is important for the Church and until recently veryimportant for the Society of Jesus. The official title is Solemnity of Mary,the Holy Mother of God. I said “recently” just now and so for the Society ofJesus, 1^st Jan was important because it was, apart from it being theSolemnity of Mary, Holy Mother of God, also the Feast of the Giving of the Nameof Jesus. Recently is as recent as 2002. With the latest edition of the LatinMissale Romanum of 2002, adecoupling took place. Mary, Holy Mother of God remained the Solemnity we markon 1^st Jan whilst the Feast of Giving of the Name of Jesus has beenshifted to 3^rd Jan. But, even for so progressive a Society like theJesuits, for the time being, we will still celebrate today as our Titular Feastbut in time to come, when our liturgy catches up with the Calendar of theUniversal Church[1],the Jesuit’s Titular Feast will be shifted to 3^rd Jan. One of thereasons for shifting the Feast of the Giving of the Name of Jesus is because aSolemnity ranks above a Feast.

These are just some technical trivia so that you might ask why we shouldnot celebrate the Giving of the Name of Jesus on 1^st Jan, after allHe is the Lord. Instead, the Church has given the honour to Our Lady. The nextlogical question would be: “Are we giving too much honour to Our Lady”?

The question as to why we should celebrate Mary, the Holy Mother of God, on1^st Jan lays bare a fear we may have that as Catholics we are idolaters.Putting aside the fear, let us attempt to uncover the foundation for why wegive such great honour to Mary.

Not long after the event of the death and resurrection of Christ, even atthe stage where the Gospels were being composed, there were already distortionsabout who Christ really was. There were already Gnostic tendencies within thecommunity of St John. They did not believe that Christ had come in the flesh.How could He condescend to become human when flesh is “evil”? John’s Gospel wasa response against these tendencies. By the use of the word “flesh”, John indicatedthat Jesus did not just take on a body as if He were putting on clothes. The Wordwas made “flesh” meant that Jesus was not some kind of appearance and nor wasHe some kind of a ghost. In fact, John’s Gospel was adetailed record of the facticity or concreteness of the event of theIncarnation. John 1—the Word became flesh; John 6—my flesh is real food and myblood is real drink; and finally, John 20ff—the post-Resurrection encounters ofthe Disciples with Jesus took place bodily, albeit a glorified body. “Put yourfinger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side”.

Furthermore, theGiving of the Name of Jesus coincides with the 8^th Day—as detailedin the Gospel—the day on which Christ was circumcised. Here again, the circumcisionis a reminder that Christ came in the flesh and that He did not merely appearin the flesh.

St Paul in theLetter to the Colossians made mention of this flesh: In His body lives thefullness of divinity (Col 2: 9). Here we are brought into the fullness of themystery which we have been celebrating these last 8 days: Christ is True Godand True Man and not 50% God and 50% Man. He is not like your Toyota Prius, ahybrid car that uses both fossil fuel and battery power. This mystery of theGod-made-man is called the Incarnation. And to call Mary the Holy Mother of Godis to make this mystery as real as it can be.

It is upon thismystery that the foundation for the whole theology of the Sacraments rests. TheSacraments are often considered a Catholic preoccupation but they are not. Infact, Pope St. Leo the Great used to say "Since the Lord is no longervisible among us, everything of Him that was visible has passed into the Sacraments".In effect, the Sacraments would not be possible without the event of theIncarnation. This follows from what Johnwrote of the Jesus whom he saw with his own eyes and touched with his ownhands: The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory (John1:14).

Mary is calledthe Holy Mother of God only because Jesus is God. And this dogma declared in AD431 atthe Council of Ephesus has salvific implications. Again we quote PopeSt Leo the Great: “Henceforth, He is reckoned to be of the stock, not of His earthlyfather but of Christ, who became the Son of Man precisely that men could alsobe sons of God. For unless in humility He had come down to us, none of us byour own merits could ever go up to Him”.

So, are we idolatrous in our relationship withMary? Or do we give too much honour to Mary? Not at all. Mary, the Holy Motherof God is a statement of our salvation as it cuts through any attempt to fudge thequestion of the universal salvation of mankind. Let me read you the Preface IIIfor Sunday, both from the old and new translation that you may appreciate howimportant the fullness Christ’s divinity and humanity is for salvation.

We see your infinite power in your loving planof salvation. You came to our rescue by your power as God but you wanted us tobe saved by one like us. Man refused your friendship but man himself was torestore it through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Old translation).

For we know it belongs to your boundlessglory, that you came to the aid of mortality itself, with your divinity andeven fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself, that the cause of ourdownfall might become the means of our salvation, through Christ our Lord. (New translation).

No Mariandogma is ever about Mary alone. So, right at the beginning of the year, in declaringMary to be the Holy Mother of God, the Church unequivocally declares that Jesusthe Lord is the Saviour of the world and through Jesus’ humanity, mankind issaved.

[1]Every religious congregation has a titular feast. It could be theFounder’s Feast Day. Since the official name for the Jesuits is the Society ofJesus, it makes sense that the titular feast should be the Feast of the Givingof the Holy Name of Jesus.

Christmas Day Mass Year B

2011-12-25T00:25:00.000+08:00

This is thefinal instalment of a four-part homily. In the 1^st instalment, Ispoke of salvation in terms of the "already and not yet". Christ already reignsthrough His Church but all the things of this world are not yet subjected toHim. Even if that may be the case, the Vigil Mass was considered joyful because we were anticipatingthe coming of Christ. We dared to celebrate because we acknowledged and trustedGod’s providence. The focus of the 2^nd instalment was on the "already"whilst we kept the "not yet" at bay. We broke into the midnight celebration ofChrist’s birth. We lingered, marvelled and rejoiced at the birth of oursalvation. In fact, the appropriate posture was silence before the manger ofthe helpless Child Jesus. Our reverential silence allowed the mystery of Godmade Man to emerge. The 3^rd instalment explained the significance ofthe ox and the donkey in the imagination of the crib. They were there becauseIsaiah spoke of the draught animals as the ones who recognised their owner and theirmaster’s crib.

Let uscontinue in this final instalment to deepen our experience of recognising Godour Lord. The Gospel Reading which consists of eighteen verses is taken fromthe Prologue of John. It is not an InfancyNarrative like those found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Prologuestarts at the very beginning of time and Creation is presented as the frameworkfor announcing the Incarnation. John makes a connexion between Genesis and hisGospel because he echoes the first verse of the Book of Genesis. “In the beginningwas the Word”. It is a profoundlybeautiful poem that the custom from the early Church was for the priestsof the Church to read it over sick people after anointing them and over newlybaptised infants. John’s Prologue was written down and placed in lockets whichthe early Christians then would wear around their necks, especially in times ofdanger or when travelling.[1]

Withthe Prologue, the Mass of the Day is a profound reflexion on why we celebrateChristmas. It is not surprising that the symbol of John’s Gospel is an eaglebecause soaring above the celestial heights he looks from the vantage point ofthe mystery of God toillustrate how this same mystery penetrates the stable and enters the flesh andblood of man. “The Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us”. (John 1:14) In fact,the Credo which we will profess shortly willinclude the same words et verbum caro factum est and atabout that time, we fall on our knees—much like the carol O Holy Night—in humble acknowledgement that themystery of the Word made flesh, this Divine condescension, this holy exchangebetween divinity and humanity, symbolised by the use of a drop of water at theEucharist, is the only explanation we can give for why we can be saved. And soat the preparation of the wine, we say, “By the mystery of the water and wine,may we come to share His divinity as He humbled Himself to share our humanity”.

Weare celebrating not just any birthday; not least of all a great man, a greatguru or a great prophet. We are celebrating the birthday of our Divine Lord in time and according to Pope Benedict, “He came as achild in order to break down our pride. Perhaps we would have capitulated before powerand wisdom, but He does not want our capitulation. He wants our love. He wantsto free us from our pride and thus make us truly free”.

We, whocome, are here to behold His glory, the glory that was His with the Father frombefore time. As we behold Him, as contemplate Him and as we gaze at Him, wetruly see ourselves. So, before we leave the Church today, get close to thecrib to stare in wonder and behold in amazement at the Son of God who came tobe like us and pray that you may walk out like Him so that you may according tothe first reading radiate and let His glory be manifest for all to see.

In summary,Christmas commemorates the dawn of our salvation. As we savour the mystery ofthe Incarnation, it is also a hopeful reminder of what we can be. Come, let usadore Him.

[1]You know the Taoist custom of writing on pieces of yellow paper(fu), folding it and placing it in a locket to be worn? We did that too.However, here I am make a distinction between an amulet and a sacramental.There is a thin line between magic and faith. An amulet is considered tocontain power in itself whereas a sacramental works on the basis of faith.

Christmas Mass at Dawn Year B

2011-12-25T00:22:00.000+08:00

This is the3^rd instalment of a four-part homily. In the 1^stinstalment, I spoke of salvation in terms of already and not yet. Christalready reigns through His Church but all the things of this world are not yetsubjected to Him. Thus, the Vigil Mass last night might be considered as ajoyful celebration in anticipation of Christ’s coming. We dared to celebratebecause we acknowledged and trusted in God’s providence.

The 2^ndinstalment, the focus was on the already whilst we kept the not yet at bay. Webroke into the midnight celebration of Christ’s birth. We lingered, marvelledand rejoiced at the birth of our salvation. In fact, we took the appropriateposture of silence before the manger of the helpless Child Jesus. Our silence allowedthe mystery of God made Man to emerge.

This 3^rdinstalment will cover the significance of what is traditionally called the Massat Dawn. Originally, this was the Mass of St Anastasia because her feast waskept on 25^th Dec. She, amongst all martyrs, enjoyed the distinction, uniquein the Roman liturgy, of having a special commemoration in the second Mass ofChristmas. Gradually, the focus shifted from her to Christ. Thus, the liturgynow continueswith the story of the birth of Jesus as found in Luke's Gospel where we find theshepherds making their way to visit to the infant Jesus.

Inconnexion with the 2^nd instalment homily, I would like to draw yourattention to a particular feature of the crib. It is the presence of twoanimals. It is to St Francis of Assisi that we credit the origin of the Crib.He directed that these animals be place therein. “I wish in full reality to awaken theremembrance of the child as he was born in Bethlehem and of all the hardship hehad to endure in his childhood. I wish to see with my bodily eyes what it meantto lie in a manger and sleep on hay, between an ox and a donkey”.

In ourcontinuing silence before Christ born in a manger, what significance do the oxand the donkey have? They are not found in any story of the New Testament.Instead they become our link to the Old Testament. According to Isaiah 1:3,“The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib. Israel knows nothing,my people understands nothing”. As such, their presence shows that there ismuch more at stake than merely pious sentiments.

Accordingly,Christmas night opens our eyes to recognise who our Saviour is. But do we?Herod did not. In fact, Herod would try to do away with the Child. The scribesand the Pharisees, ironically, those who were specialists in sacred scriptureshad failed to recognise Him who was the author of their learned field. TheGospel of Luke today reveals the real oxen and donkeys: the shepherds, and soonto be the wise men from Orient land and of course, Mary and Joseph. Furthermore,the symbolism should not be missed that the Christ-Child, in between the twodraught animals, should be placed in a manger, no less a feeding trough. Theanimal recognised that He who lay in a feeding trough would soon Himself becomingthe feed or the food for the hungry. The Eucharistic connotation is quiteapparent in the placement of the Baby in a manger between the draught animals.[1]

But, failureto recognise Christ the Saviour is quite easy. For us, who think we love Jesus,it is easy to miss Him out in the Church, the community, the neighbour and theones closest to us, our relatives and family. It is easy to turn a blind eye toHim with our smugness. Or when we become engrossed with our comfort zone, it iseasy to lose sight of who is important in salvation. Finally, many of us have mistakenfacts as wisdom, blinded as we are by the availability of information that wehave lost a sense of wonderment of the mystery of the God-made-man.

Last night,way past our midnight Mass, a server thanked me for the “brevity” of the homilybut he added that it lacked the “oomph”. My response to him was that he hadmissed the point. It was supposed to be simple and without oomph because theevent spoke for itself—God spoke most definitively through His Word—the Christ.Human words can never measure up to the Word. So, Christmas is the time to askGod to grant us the grace of that simplicity of heart so that like the ox andthe donkey, we may recognise God Almighty in the Child Jesus, as St Francis ofAssisi did whenever he contemplated a crib.

[1] It challenges us today if we understand whom we are receiving atHoly Communion. The irreverence is symptomatic of a kind of ignorance thatrequires so much more catechising if we were to defeat it.

Christmas Midnight Mass Year B

2011-12-25T00:12:00.000+08:00

It is the Midnight Mass. Did you know, minus the Vigil Mass, that the timingof the Christmas liturgies, and there are three of them, revolves around theinterplay between light (or its absence) and the co-called three nativities ofChrist? The timing, meaning what time a Mass is celebrated, can be said tocorrespond to the nativity of Christ before (or outside of) time, in time andin our hearts.

Midnight with its darkness contemplates the mystery of the Only BegottenSon of the Father—a mystery written in the vocabulary of eternity—as the Credogoes—born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, trueGod from true God.

Mass at Dawn recalls the birth of Christ in time—by the Holy Spirit Hewas incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became Man. At Bethlehem, the appearanceof the Son in history corresponds to dawn dispelling the darkness of the night.

And finally, the Mass during the Day points us to Christ being born inour souls, through the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. With the grace of Christ inour hearts we are enlightened.

This timing or the interplay of light and darkness is well and good toknow. There is however, another aspect of the Christmas Liturgy which Ihighlighted earlier this evening at the Vigil Mass. It is the “already and notyet” mark of salvation and also of Christian discipleship. Tonight, this"already and not yet" characteristic of salvation history is best expressed inthe sense that we focus on the "already" as we keep the "not yet" at bay.

Why do we do that? We stress the "already" because it is a celebration ofhow great God is. Thus, our worship calls to linger, to marvel and to rejoice.

We linger because God has come. Have you ever been to a party where theend takes like forever? This type of experience is at times termed as “Stationsof the Cross” because people take forever to say goodbye. Fortunately, that iswhere the analogy ends because this kind of a goodbye is tiring. But, ourlingering here is not tiring. We linger because of a marvellous deed that Godhas done in history.

God has shown his great sense of humour. He whom the universe cannotcontain is contained in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So, we marvel atthe birth of a child whom the first reading acclaims as the light that shone ona people in darkness. We, like the shepherds, hurry to Bethlehem to pay homageto the Creator of the world lying helplessly in a manger.

And here, to linger and to marvel requires a lot more courage andcertainly humility. Instead of lingering and marvelling, what we encounter is theprevailing dynamo driving the spirit of Christmas—a dynamism which consists alot more of noise and distraction. If we are not eating, then we are drinking.If we are not drinking then we are shopping. If we are not shopping then we arevisiting… and so on. The courage is for us to step aside, perform a kind of paradox,to stand in silence before so stupendous a mystery as the Son of God became Manand was born in time. Without having to say anything—our silence allows themystery of our salvation to emerge.

This is not easy for a generation oriented to results, this kind oflingering to marvel would seem unproductive. But maybe we dare not, not becausewe are result-oriented but because we have arrogated to ourselves the positionof God? Yes, Psalm 8 proclaims that we are little less than a god and we are invitedalso to behave LIKE God—as in being His co-creators –but the sad reality is weoften behave AS God. In short, we dare not allow God to be God which explains ournecessity to act as if we were the saviours of the world.

Tonight, we are reminded that there is only one Saviour of the world andHe is Emmanuel because He has come to be with us. Yes, He appeared in time as ahelpless Babe but we rejoice that this helpless Babe will one day lay down Hislife so that the world will be restored to the Father’s glory. As we standbefore the crib, the only appropriate posture is silence. So, in reverential silencebefore the manger, whatever problems we have, no matter how heavy our burden ofsin may be, and even if the world is still not right, the helpless little Babeinvite us to trust Him to bear our burden because He alone is the Saviour ofthe world. Come let us adore Him.

Christmas Vigil Year B

2011-12-24T00:10:00.000+08:00

I think the people with the best eyesight in the world are Filipinos,well, rich Filipinos, at least. For security reasons, the windscreens andwindows of their cars are heavily tinted. I get extremely claustrophobicsitting in one of these cars not knowing where I am or in which direction I am headingto. Analogously, there is also a quality of uncertainty in all our Christmas liturgiesand it is perhaps strongest in this evening’s liturgy. There is a quality ofuncertainty that is associated with the injunction to “watch and pray”.

Uncertainty is quite a disturbing state of being especially to ageneration accustomed to pressing buttons. We have come to expect that life’ssolutions can be got from merely a push of a button. However, the vigil’s liturgyis pretty much that of “uncertainty” as in “already and not yet”. If you like,this is best captured by the caricature of children in a car askingincessantly: “Are we there yet”.

How can one understand and describe this notion of "already and not yet"?

Listen to the Preface II for Advent.For all the oracles of the prophets foretold Him, the Virgin Mother longed forHim with love beyond all telling, John the Baptist sang of His coming andproclaimed His presence when He came. It is by His gift that already we rejoiceat the mystery of His Nativity, so that He may find us watchful in prayer andexultant it His praise.

An observation may be made here. This Mass is called the Vigil Mass. TheLatin vigilia, from which we derive the term "vigil", means to keepwatch. The Church designates the day before a feast or a solemnity as a Vigilbecause its nature is to prepare for a greater day that is to follow. Throughthe liturgy, this is one way the Church keeps close to the injunction of HerLord and Saviour to “keep watch and pray”. So, in some countries, today is alsoa day of fasting. They fast to heighten the reception of the day that is tocome.

Thus, in this so-called interim period, there is a profound sense thatwhat we want is already here but not completely yet. It is by His gift thatalready we rejoice and this is important. Why?

"Already and not" yet allows us to catch a glimpse of heaven. For many ofus, "already and not yet" is unnerving because we want to catch heaveninstantaneously. If you take a moment to reflect, all our experiences ofexhilaration are but glimpses of heaven. What it means is that we want theaccess to heaven on tap—as in we devise ways and means to heighten ourexhilaration. Is it any wonder why recreational drugs are part of the cultureof our youths?

It is not to say that we should not have any excitement or wonderment. Infact, it is a testament of trust in God that we dare leave aside our worriesand concentrate on the moment, to enjoy the moment, to savour the moment… evenif we are at a loss, even if we have no work and even if we are struggling tocome to terms with the death of our loved ones.

Why? Because it is already and also not yet.

This is why Jesus dared speak to Judas in a way which was shocking, a waywhich seemed to canonise an aberration which today we are trying so hard toeradicate. He said, “The poor you always have with you”. What this means isthat we may banish all hunger in the world but it is still not heaven. We mayresolve every conflict in the world and we would not even approximate paradise.And the list goes on. Yet, this is not an admission of defeat as the Catechism remindsus that Christ the Lord already reigns through the Church, but all the thingsof this world are not yet subjected to Him. But, one thing certain is that withChrist at the helm of His Church, in a nation, in our family and of us, we dareto celebrate. In fact, when God seems to be at His weakest as in the helplessbabe, we encounter His greatest providence.

Thus, this evening’s liturgy is full of hope. "Already and not yet" pointsus in the direction of God. Already as in God will be there and we do not needto play God. Thus, tonight, let us leave God to be God and let us joyfully waitfor the moment when the Saviour of the world will burst into our lives.

4th Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-12-18T23:15:00.000+08:00

The 4^th Sunday of Advent continues with a panoramic sweep ofthe salvation history but this time the spotlight will come to rest on Mary. Itmakes sense because the birth of a child is also a celebration of motherhood.

So the Gospel tells the story of how this motherhood is prepared. But, itis a preparation that goes further back than the Gospel. In the first reading,we hear of a settled and victoriousKing David who intended, in thanksgiving, to build a dwelling worthy to housethe Ark of God’s covenant but only to be put in his place. God was gentlyreminding David that no man was ever going to build a house worthy of God.Instead, God reminded David of his humble beginnings and made a promise that Hewas going to make of the House of David one that endures forever and this cameto fruition in one of his descendants: Mary.

The Lucan focus on Mary is based on a kind of typology of which anyonefamiliar with the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures would not miss the connexion. Tospeak of an enduring dynasty is to speak of God’s desire to be close to Hispeople in a special way. In the Old Testament, Moses was instructed by God tobuild a tabernacle in order to house the Ark of the Covenant. Within the Arkare found the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Thecompletion of the Ark saw the cloud of glory covering the tent of meeting asthe glory of God filled the tabernacle. The noun “cloud” and the verbs “tocover” or “to overshadow” are metaphors for the presence and glory of God. Herewe find the link between the first reading and Mary. It is easy to miss the parallel between the Holy Spirit overshadowingthe Ark and the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, between the Ark of the OldCovenant as the dwelling place of God and Mary as the new dwelling place of God.David’s intent on building a house worthy for God is now reversed to Godbuilding a house worthy of Himself: in Mary.

Now we understandwhy Mary is called the Ark of God’s Covenant. She plays an immensely importantrole in the history of salvation. The Ark of the Old Covenant signified thespiritual presence of God but in Mary,the Ark of the New Covenant, God comes to dwell with his people not onlyspiritually but physically. He takes residence in the womb of a specially preparedJewish girl.

According tothe Old Testament, only one item was placed inside the Ark: the stone tabletsof the Ten Commandments whereas the author of the Letter to the Hebrew (9:4),revealed that two additional items were added in: the golden bowl holding themanna and the budding rod of Aaron. Here another parallel should not be missed.In the Ark, we find the law of God inscribed in stone; in Mary's womb weencounter the Word of God in flesh. In the Ark, the golden bowl is placed andit contained the manna, the bread from heaven that kept God's people alive inthe wilderness; Mary's womb housed the Bread of Life come down from heaven thatbrings eternal life. In the Ark there is the budding rod of Aaron, the proof oftrue priesthood; Mary's womb bears the true priest. Thus, David’s wish for aworthy house of God is now come true.

Our Catholicveneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, not just the Blessed Virgin Mary, is not ascriptural aberration because she is the living shrine of the Word of God. Sheis rightly the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant. Our insistence with thevirginity of Mary is not an indication of a Catholic puritanical obsession butinstead, the ancient dogma of Mary’s virginity is really a statement about Jesus Christ and whoHe really is. The Ark which contains the Real Presence of God cannot be usedfor any other purpose, no matter how honourable.

Today, weare standing right at the front door of Christmas and before we enter, thisSunday is an invitation to pause a while, to ponder a little bit more on themotherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is where we are involved. In ananalogous manner, her motherhood is also ours. The Blessed Virgin Mary is thearchetype of the Church now preparing for the birth of Christ. She bore the Sonof God in her womb. We must bear the Son of God in our hearts. She is the Arkof the Covenant. We become the Temple of God’s HolySpirit.

3rd Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-12-11T02:25:00.000+08:00

Some priestswill not be caught dead in this chasuble but the change in colour might be agood time to speak of the joy that should express itself. What does it mean tohave joy even in the midst of trials and tribulations?

The seasonsof Lent and Advent have for their liturgical colour Violet. In the midst ofthese two seasons we discover the colour Rose. The Sundays characterised by thecolour Rose are called Laetare or Gaudete. At Masses whenwe do not sing, we should recite the Entrance Antiphon. Both Laetareand Gaudeteare translated from the respective Antiphons as “Rejoice”.

The colourRose reveals the wisdom of the Church who perceives the coincidence of nature withthe mysteries of salvation. Both light and life are the two natural phenomenaof nature. From darkness and death, light and life emerge and so the changefrom darkness to light is captured by the season of winter and the transitionfrom death to life is proper to the season of spring. The liturgical cycle ofthe Church is therefore based on these phenomena. The progressive diminishmentof light and the silence of life germinating are both captured most fittinglyby the colour Violet and not, surprisingly by Black. Why? Black is not really acolour. Instead, Black may be described as the absence of colour and of light,whereas, Rose which brightens the shade of Violet stands as an anticipation ofthe reality of the birth of Christ at Christmas and the new life ofResurrection at Easter.

The colourRose in the midst of these two seasons places us within the mystery of the“already, and not yet” of Christian life here on earth. It leaves behind thedark of violet but it is not completely white yet. So, we have been saved andyet we wait for Christ to come. 1 Cor 13:12 says it most aptly: Now we areseeing a dim reflexion in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face.This Rose of “already, and not yet” may help navigate our discipleship throughthis lacrimarumvalle, this valley of tears.

We often hearof the three comings of the Lord. In times past, He came to us in our weaknessand in our flesh. In the future, He will come again in glory and with majesty.At Christmas, He comes in Spirit and in power. Now, there is continuity orintegrity at Advent whereby the three comings are at once celebrated and anticipated.We rejoice with the Prophets of old who waited for the coming of the Messiahand marvel at how His coming has made a profound difference in history. We alsolong for His Second Coming with the clouds of heaven so that our journey tolife’s completion may come to a happy conclusion. However, there is a meantimewhereby we wait for His coming more deeply into our life now, so as to preparefor His final coming.

Amongst thethree comings, two are visible—in the past and in the future. The presentcoming is invisible and this is the one which is not easy because waiting isnot an easy exercise. We are readily distracted by the cares of the world andweighed down by the burdens of life. So, Holy Mother Church dares us to holdour heads high not because of pride but because she believes with her beingthat salvation is near. As the colour Rose lightens the dark of Violet, we dareto rejoice because Christ’s salvation approaches us. So we are joyful thatChrist can come more deeply into our lives.

As He comes,the Church encourages us to ask for the virtues of fortitude and patience. Itis always easy to try to change something outside of us. You can repaint ahouse or renovate a kitchen. You can do up your car and decorate your house.But, the work of inner conversion requires fortitude. It is a virtue needed forour journey. Imagine the number of people who have given up hope especiallywith regard to a recurring sin. They think that confession once will removetheir propensity to sin but their experience is otherwise. They keep failingand falling and as result they lose courage. Fortitude is the strength not tolose hope whereas patience is the ability to wait in anticipation as God worksHis miracle upon us. Thus, patience is fortitude over time because there ishardship involved in waiting especially when we are changing. We live in aninstantaneous bubble expecting that what we want is always on tap and all weneed is to press the button. But, as in all interior conversion, it is alife-long journey which often involves letting go of that which is beyond ourcontrol, a letting go which is not despairing but is full of trust in God.

Let me tellyou a story of which I am not proud. But, it may give you a glimpse of how ourjoy is to be like. It was a Gaudete Sunday Mass. The processionstarted and the manner the entrance hymn was sung, I wanted to kill myselfbecause it sucked the joy out of me. Now, you see, a lot of times our reactionto the joy being sucked out of us is to blame the other person as in “I waspissed off. You made me angry. You made me do it.”. It was difficult to shakeoff the annoyance whilst I was celebrating Mass. Sometimes, we may say toourselves, “I already have a difficult day and I do not need this”… and so wejustify our anger or worse our rage. Forme, as priests, these are the “reasons” for my anger or annoyance: stupidparishioners who do not seem to understand, sacristan who keeps missing out onthings, choir that sings so that nobody wants to sing, altar servers whocontinually make the same mistakes. Objectively, there may be a lot of truth inwhat I have just mentioned and there is need for improvement. But, the truth isthis, many a times life is never organised according to what we think it shouldbe and whilst it can be trying, Christian joy should still be able to breakthrough not because it is falsely optimistic. It is less emotion and more anattitude because it comes from an inner strength that is based on trust in Godand support by both fortitude and patience.

Thus,fortitude and patience are needed so that joy may radiate from us even if weshould stand in the shadow of the Cross. Since we cannot give of ourselvesthese virtues, we need to beseech the Lord for them. As the darkness of nightenvelops us, we know that soon light will prevail. Soin the joy of fortitude and patience, we keep watch. As Christ came oncebefore, we dare to cast our anxieties onto Him, as we wait and watch for theday when He will come again at Christmas or at the end of time.

2nd Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-12-04T02:18:00.000+08:00

There is a certaintyranny in relevance makes the writing of homily daunting. Why? One has to findsomething relevant to say. Until one remembers, we are to preach Christ in andout of season. We began a journey intoMark’s Gospel last Sunday and the key to the whole Gospel of Mark is foundright the beginning: It is the Good News about Jesus Christ.

Mark’s Gospel at thebeginning makes it clear that Jesus Christ IS the Son of God and unlike theother Gospels that established credentials either before creation or in timethrough the Infancy Narratives, he gets straight down to the business ofproclaiming the good news of the same Jesus Christ the Lord.

We live, for all intentspurposes, in a world where money can buy just about anything and yet it is aworld which is markedly joyless. In this worry weary world, what is so goodabout Jesus Christ? How can He be good news when we face before us, brokenness,misery and loneliness? Nonetheless, before we dismiss the Gospel as irrelevant,both the Prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist give us a vision of how this newsis good.

Isaiah consoled thepeople by recalling them to how God would bind the wounds of those whose sins havebeen forgiven. John recalled those who came in repentance to wait for the onlyOne who could baptise with the Holy Spirit.

We are presented withthis vision of a future world which, if we think about it, is one which callsus to make ourselves ready for it. In short, this vision will not come tofruition if we are not prepared for it. Again, in a world of silver platterswhere we expect all good things to be served on, this sounds like a littleletdown. Perhaps, our idea of good fun may help illuminate our attitude towardsgratuity. For us, fun means as little effort as possible with the maximum returnin pleasure. When something is given free, we believe that we are entitled toit without any effort. In other words, God’s gratuitous gift is not as free asit seems. The truth is, grace may be given freely but it will never violate ourfreedom to accept or reject it.

In that way, the visionproposed by both Isaiah and John the Baptist is not without our effort. We havea part to play which is why John the Baptist said, “Make straight your path”.

Today, we are encouragedto prepare the way so that God’s vision of a world which He can recognise and inwe can flourish may come true. It requires that we change so that the world canchange. It is about conversion. But change is not easy.

You remember the CatholicBusiness Fraternity drive last week or so? They were trying to get moreCatholics to register so that Catholic businesses can reach the wider Catholicaudience. Firstly, the way I said it made it sound ghettoish. Secondly, I didmention, whilst promoting the drive last week, that I tend to give my businessto Catholics. Usually, I am partial to ours as the Teochews would say, “Ka tinang”… “Our own people”. Consider it a weakness which I easily give into.

Now, this happened twoyears ago. I was on the way back to Maranatha Retreat House because I had comedown for a wedding. It was along Jalan Kuching and the road was jammed. A carbehind me on my left tried to switch lanes and as it did, I braked because thecars in front braked. Consequently, the switching-lane car rammed into me. Ipulled aside and when I got out of the car, I saw the ubiquitous rosary hangingfrom the usual rear-view mirror. I was relieved and I was actually willing toforget the whole thing. Catholic-Catholic… but, the two men who got out oftheir car, were confrontational and they blamed me for their carelessness. Infact, they sounded threatening. That time, I told myself, “To hell with you”and told them that it would be better if we settled it by making our respectivepolice reports. They did not show up at the police station and I subsequentlymade a claim against their insurance.

What is the moral here?Jesus did say in Matthew 5:46ff: For if you love those who love you, what righthave you to claim any credit? Even tax collectors do as much, do they not? Youmust therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The vision of the worldproposed by Isaiah and John requires that much change. But, we are unwillingto. It is a way of behaviour that goes a mile or even more further. When Ithink about the incident, I am not proud of it. We forgive even when peoplecannot forgive us. We love when people cannot love us.[1] Our change cannot bemerely reciprocal in the sense that we react to people. Our standards must beChrist’s.

When we think that it isonly our efforts that can bring about such a conversion, then we would havefailed. The standard has been set by Christ and therefore the grace will be Histo supply. As I have said it before, hope is eschatological in the sense thatit is always one step ahead of us. That is why we celebrate Advent every year.The cycle reminds us that conversion is not an event. It is like you go forconfession and voila you will not sin again? No, the minute you step out of theconfessional, you see someone you do not like, you sin… It is a journey and aprocess. Nevertheless, St Peter exhorts us to continue to live saintly lives. Aswe change ourselves, we hope, we pray and we wait for God to make true what weon our own cannot achieve.

[1]There is a nuance here whichis important. I am not advocating that you sit down and allow, for example,your fundamental rights as citizens are taken away. I am referring to my senseof “revenge”. Have you ever experience “unequal” forgiveness? You want toforgive and move on but the other party refuses. And you become righteouslyangry that he or she refuses. It is that kind of revenge or anger….

Triduum Day 2

2011-12-02T02:30:00.000+08:00

Today, we continue withour Triduum. Tomorrow, Fr Colin Tan, our Regional Superior will preach thefinal homily. Despite the best of intentions, Murphy’s Law applies to thesituation in the Parish Office. I live the tension of organised chaos. Myconstant companion in the last ten years has been this phantom standing next tome: “Homily. Homily. Homily. Have you done it?” and as I struggle these days, theemails, letters and things administrative are stacking up around my table andas a result another part of me is screaming out, “Clear the mess. Clear themess”. It has been like this each time we arrive at Thursday or Friday of theweek.

Today is also the calmbefore the storm—the big day being tomorrow. This is the “What shall I do?” inbetween Day I and Day III—neither here nor there. I spent the whole day tryingto mould the homily and it has not been easy. Let me take my cue fromyesterday. For many of us, truth is what works. That being the case, our concernwith what works is expressed through the arena of economics, technology,business and for some the corridors of power. But, I am concerned about thetruth of being because John Paul II did in his encyclical Fides et ratio say this: the neglect of being inevitably leads tolosing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of humandignity (FE, 90). Nothing is as important to us today as the very talk ofhuman dignity. One of the reasons we give in to the dictates of politicalcorrectness is because calling a person retarded would somehow injure his“human dignity”. Indeed, let us ask the grace to return to the truth of beingso that we may live the being of truth.

How can we live the beingof truth?

We need to take care ofour ideas.

A loaded automaticmachine-gun can kill tens of people. But millions die from an idea. Forexample, Hitler’s idea of the purity of a race sent millions of Jews, Gypsies,Slavs and retards/disabled to their death. What we consider to be nothing todaycan be the Godzillas of tomorrow! Suffice to say that the basis of our living thebeing of truth is founded on the ideas that we have. The trouble with ideas isthe more fundamental they are, the more we seem to assume or take for granted.Therefore, part of the process of breaching the walls of the entrapped “I” is apainful need to re-look at some of the fundamental ideas we hold to beimportant in life.

One of the most importantideas of all is the idea of progress. This is my point. In seeing something wedo not see the eye. It is only when we cannot see well that we begin to ask if somethingis not right with the eye. To see the eye, we need to look into a mirror. Thus,the idea of progress is like the eye. We can see progress in leaps and boundsbut we do not really examine its foundation. What is progress? Not only does itconnote an inevitable march but it also carries with it a threat. We invoke themarch of progress to justify almost everything that we want to do. And dare youstand against its march?

The most optimisticexpression of the idea of progress is technology. You would have heard me speakabout technology here and there and it seems that I am attacking technology,coming as it were, from an obscurantist position. But, have you heard of Odysseus?He was the protagonist of the Homeric poem Odyssey which in part was a sequelto the Illiad. Troy, Trojan Horse and Helen the face that sank athousand ships, etc. Odysseus, post the Trojan war, wasmaking his way home. In his sojourn, he and his men came to a place where theinhabitants ate lotus-flowers. Subsequently, two men ate of the lotus-flowerscausing them to forget their home-coming.

What is the moral of thestory? Apart from the use of narcotics to induce a mystical state of mind, themoral here is that we are often enamoured by whatever takes our fancy thusforgetting our original intention. Progress is like the lotus-flower for itentrances us. We assume that progress is advancement, amelioration,breakthrough, development and certainly evolutionary. In the field ofreproductive technologies, the Church is viewed as really behind time or worseas an enemy of human progress. Yes, we know that under the sway of technology,mankind has been subject to the tyranny of progress. Progress does not followlaws, least of all, the law of morality except that it is itself the lawmeaning that progress is inevitable.

Is it?

Thus, we need to lookinto the mirror. And for many of us, technology will never allow us thatfreedom to look into that mirror. Imagine that you can shrink a picture withthe pinch of two fingers or enlarge it by spreading two fingers and how thatwould look like to people a hundred years ago. Transport yourself back and youwould be an instant magician. We crave connectivity and I suspect that ouraching to be reached instantaneously is a symptomatic cry of loneliness of theentrapped “I”. We live in a world, should I say, environmentally hostile world,where we are not really in control andtechnological progress steps in with gadgetry that promises control, feeding our fantasy that all these gadgets will promise us everythingand asks nothing of us. That is why technology has to be sexy.

Some of you know that there is a blog of homilies which are postedhopefully after each Sunday. I resisted it for a long time but even I succumbedto the allure of reaching a ready audience. Fr Michael and I joke in thismanner: “Hey, have you worshipped at my temple yet ah”? Well, I usually do not goto his temple even though sometimes I am amazed at how good a few of myhomilies are. Have to be honest here. The point is not the homilies. The pointis captured by the phenomenon of Facebook. “To like”, as a verb, is nowtransformed into a click. Imagine how much we now want to be liked and in theworld of Facebook, we are instant stars or celebrities of our own movies. Anidea, unexamined, may lead us to places we never would think of going and thetemptation of the entrapped “I” in a technologically progressive world, isnarcissism—self-worship.

I love gadgets to tell the truth. I am fascinated by the progress oftechnology but I am always conscious that progress is not a journey ofinevitability. We are on a journey somewhere and for Christianity, somewhere isnot even a place. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then somewhere is wherethe Head is. If we are to be “rescued” from the lotus-eating stupor ofprogress, then it requires that we step back to examine and to reflect throughcritical thinking.Critical thinking is needed but not of the kind that we are used to—critical. Orthe kind of conspiratorial thinking we feed on. Critical thinking is concernedwith precision when we define things, even if it should border on pedantry.Why? Ideas have grave ramifications. Otherwise, the entrapped “I” of yesterday’shomily will become the individual of relativism.

How are we to achievecritical thinking? The use of reason, informed reason and not just practicalreason, is one. Reason here is not the reason of the Enlightenment but ratherthe reason guided by faith because faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.There is also the need to widen our knowledge of how ideas came about and thisis done through a careful historical research. What is important to note aboutcritical thinking though is that it is as much a methodology as it is anattitude.

In this regard, I mustsay that the Society of Jesus is to be thanked and loved for whatever that Ihave shared with you. Six years acquiring the degrees in philosophy have notgone to waste. An attitude that I think is important is to recognise and acceptthat truth can be approximated. In speaking, I am not known for subtletybecause I suffer not from “foot and mouth” disease but from “foot-in-mouth”disease. But, listen again to the language used or better still, read thelanguage employed. Of course, some slip-ups may take place but the languageused in almost all the homilies is propositional. In what sense are theypropositional? I often begin my sentence with “maybe” or “perhaps”. Underneaththis seeming uncertainty is “an” assumption, not “the” assumption, that “I donot possess the truth”. Instead, I am a poor servant of the truth. Therefore,the philosopher Habermas comes to life. He speaks of the “unforced force of thebetter argument”. Here, you detect an assumption which is important: There istruth to be known. And every encounter we have should lead us into the light oftruth.

Why is such an attitudeespecially in dialogue important in the light of truth? This attitude isimportant because the person is located in community. You see our idea of person is “individualistic”.We conjure up in our head a discrete individual with his/her range of powersand everything else. However, the word “individual” even though it suggestsdistinctiveness, in truth, it is not separated from the community. The veryidea of an individual really leads us back to the community. For example, one cannotsay, “I am alone” without saying it to someone else. Even the very thought of“I am alone” presupposes that you are having a conversation with someone in thehead. Thus, for an individual to be totally discrete or distinct he must remainsilent.

But, silence is not acalling. It may be an option because we definitely need it in order to hear Godand a large dosage of it might just be the remedy the soul needs. Still, ourcalling, in the midst of progress, is to re-ground or re-establish theindividual in the community. Even the most remote or archaic hermitage of monksor nuns are in a way linked to the community. As long as they pray the DivineOffice, they are part of the Church.

There is a subtle shifthere. The community is Church. Here, the community is not an amorphous ideathat is romantically defined according to the principles of egalitarianism orif you like, a “kumbayah” non-threatening community that makes no demands onthe individual. This form of community as we conceive of is basicallysociological or political organised along principles of functionality. Whereas,the Church, as community par excellence, makes demands on us because she is by hervery nature hierarchical because she is markedly sacramental. How? Christ andthe Church are variously described as bridegroom and bride, head and body.Apart from the spousal or the anatomical analogy we use to describe therelationship between Christ and the Church, there is also the sacramentaldefinition. She, the Church, is the sacrament of Christ and therefore as asacrament, she is also hierarchical and as such, she makes demands on us. Andas a corollary, there is no such thing as Christ without the Church. In beinghierarchical, now you know why in the Catholic Church, there is only one Pope.

Perhaps you can see,there is more than meets the eye in the renovation of the Church. All thebeauty of the Church points us in the direction of Christ the Head who is noless than the definition of beauty Himself. Not the shallow cosmetic beautyoffered through physiological augmentation technology but beauty which is cosmological(heavenly) and therefore aesthetically pleasing. This is the journey which Ihave committed myself to in the last ten years and wish to share with you. Itis a journey that requires that we make moral judgement as well as decisionsinstead of being carried along the inevitable tsunami of technologicalprogress. In a way, we must make the crucial decision that we want to become apart of something larger than ourselves.

Now you understand why Iam unabashedly Catholic. There is a universality about the Catholic Churchwhich transcends the individual but not a kind of transcendence whichpatronises the individual as if it were something to be rid of. No, amidst thestruggles that people have of Church, I behold the beauty of the Churchreflected in her teaching, in her governance and certainly, in her worship.Therefore, I desire with every fibre of my being to be a servant of theChurch—Holy Mother Church.

I am coming to the endnow. And I have to sort of wrap up my part of the Triduum for tomorrow, it willbe Father Colin Tan. Let me tell you that it is no fun doing this because mynatural instinct has been basically why to work when you can skive. However,let me just recap some of the points that I have made thus far so that I mayland.

There is objective truth,a concern with being, so that our ethics may be expressions and reflexions ofthe truth of being. To get to the truth of being, we need to be critical of theassumptions that we have. I made a long excursus on the idea we have ofprogress and how progress is not really the be all and end all of existence, nomatter how captivating it may be. I ground the whole search for truth in thecommunity and the community in our context is Church. The Church is our HolyMother whom we all sometimes take for granted and I see how everything I havedone thus far has been to serve she who is none other than the Bride of Christ.It now makes sense that I am a Jesuit for the Society of Jesus was founded forthe sole purpose of serving the Lord alone and His bride, the Church under theRoman Pontiff, his Vicar on earth.

Triduum Day 1 (St. Edmund Campion)

2011-12-01T02:28:00.000+08:00

Iam a hypocrite. I do not know about you.

Ido not practise what I preach. I do not know about you.

Ido not like “I”. But, I do not like “I” is not the same as I do not like “me” ofthe poor self-esteem kind even if that may be true that I do not like “me”.But, I do not like “I” because it is not a good starting point for homilies forthe reasons of hypocrisy or the reason of not practising what one preaches.[1]

However,this much is what each one here should know. “I” should not be the startingpoint of our morality because the “I” may not be the best barometer of what orhow we ought to behave. For example, many of us may say, “I am a hypocrite andtherefore who am I to judge?” What this statement means is that our moralitywill be based on the lowest common denominator. Just because I am not “up tothe mark” does not mean I cannot say something.

So,there is a reason for not liking this “I” which might become clear to youlater. For now, with this little preamble, I will proceed to speak to you inthe person of “I”.

Today,we celebrate St Edmond Campion. Let me say a few things about him and then getto the point where he is important to why I choose to speak as an “I”.

Firstly,who was he? He was a Jesuit priest, born in the England of social upheaval andreligious persecution. What was he famous for? He was the most famous of theEnglish martyrs who gave up a promising career at Oxford and also an invitationto enter the service of Queen Elizabeth I of England in order to become aCatholic priest. Why did he do that? He was ordained a deacon in the Church ofEngland and the more he studied, the more he became convinced that the CatholicChurch had the true faith. Thus, in conscience, he had to leave England and inhis sojourn in Continental Europe, he joined the Society of Jesus. When the newmission to England opened up, he and two others were the first few to be sent.In London where he arrived, he wrote a manifesto of the mission which became knownas the "Campion's Brag."

Themission was religious and not political. Let me read a snippet towards the endof the Brag which was directed to the Privy Council of the Queen. “And touching our Society, be it known toyou that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose successionand multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carrythe cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while wehave a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, orconsumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun;it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must berestored.”

Nevermind the pride detected therein or even the naïveté of a brash Jesuit. The “expense is reckoned, the enterprise isbegun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood”.

Tonight,I would like to speak of the expense and the enterprise that has begun. But,humbly, I cannot promise that it is of God therefore there is no guarantee thatit will last.

TheJubilee draws to close a journey that we have begun not just two and half yearsago but ten years ago to be precise. I must say with gratitude to God our Lordthat He has deign to retain me that long in this parish because it was only inthe last few years that the shape of the enterprise has become clearer and morefocused.

Howcan I describe this focus?

Firstly,the “I” I mentioned earlier. It is an entrapped “I”. We are unable to speakbecause we do not possess enough credibility and the result is a kind ofPelagianism. When we speak only because we are perfect or have credibility, itis another way of saying that I, on my own, possess the strength and grace tomake God worthy of me.[2]But, that is not even our “sin”. It is the walls that we have built up in sucha way that we are not able to speak to one another anymore. Perhaps youunderstand why “Self-Help” is so popular because it is symptomatic of a worldof entrapped “I”s. Furthermore, this “I” is actually more “me” than anythingelse and this “me” cannot be the foundation of what we intend to build: “theseremain faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to thebreaking of bread and to the prayers”. The “I” of Acts 2:42, is a communitarian“I”. And when we are unable to breach the walls of the entrapped “I”, we arereduced to looking for things to do, in order to unite us. Just observe thestalemate in the field of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue. We dare notdream that truth can be arrived at and therefore we are content to try to“work” together. No wonder we have to speak of tolerance or acceptance.

Secondly,to allow a “communitarian I” to emerge is to describe an ontological journey. Whatdo I mean by that? Ontology is the study of being. What is so great about that?Nothing! If you consider that it is probably a dead science. For example, somepriests no longer believe in “ontological change” when it comes to thedescription of ordination to the priesthood.[3]According to them, such a phrase has no meaning. So, who cares what a thing maybe except that it works. If you think about it, a part of the difficulty thatwe encounter in building community is because we have focused on thefunctionality of community. We are concerned with the structures that makecommunity work. So, we set out to build the BECs thinking that by giving theBECs structures they will work. How far have we gone? Is it not true that weconstantly have to reinvent ourselves? Is it not true that we often find ithard to convince people of the need to be part of the BEC. Does a husband needto re-invent himself? Or a wife? OK, maybe wives need to lah because of theavailability of plastic surgery. But, we instinctively know that there arecouples, for all intents and purposes, are not “in fashion” but their love lastseems to last longer than fads come and go. You see, structures help but theydo not define us.

Maybethis has not escaped you. The current batch of altar servers is not allowed toreceive Holy Communion on the hand. All of them just follow the “ruling”because Father has decreed it so. But, do you know why? The reason isontological. Either it is or it is not the Body of Christ. Perhaps, for many ofus, it is symbolic more than it is really the Body of Christ. What we receiveis the True Presence, not false. What we receive is really Jesus, not a symbol.What we receive is substantially the same Jesus who walked 2000 years ago. Imean, I sometimes see how an elderly person comes up tottering and unstable andreceives Holy Communion on the hand. He is afraid that the HC might fall out ofhis hand and so he grabs it. There is desecration that takes place because ingrabbing the Consecrated Host, they will be particles of sacred species thatdrop of the hand. Now, unless the teaching of the Church has changed, ourbehaviour must comport with what Holy Communion really is. I go through themotion of cleaning the sacred vessels because I behave according to what HolyCommunion really is. Ontology, that is, being determines the manner of ouracting.

Iwant to be clear about this. My telling you this is not asking you to changeyour mode of receiving Holy Communion. Instead, it gives you an example of howthe journey you have been making in the last ten years is like, fortunately orunfortunately, with me at the helm. It is a journey, which I would describe, inthe reclamation of ontology. Is it important? It is.

My“conversation” with the altar servers over 10 years has been based on this.They are the best if you consider that they have somehow perfected the ritualto a “T”. How did they do this? Fear and punishment were the tools to achieveperfection. When fear and punishment were removed, their true character cameout. Little interiorisation was taking place and conversion was negligible. Theconversation has not been easy because their mode of engagement and by andlarge ours too, is markedly functional. Do what is required in order to meetthe “definition” of what a server is supposed to be.

Thisconversation I have been having with the serves is mirrored at large with theparish. We are best when we are functional. It is efficient. But, when we arefunctional, whatever we do is merely a job and we return to what we have alwaysbeen when there is nothing to do. Imagine relationships built on functionality.Can you imagine this of a wife or of a mother? Furthermore, when we operateaccording to the principle of function, what happens when we do not feel likefunctioning? What happens when we do not feel up to serving or working or beinga husband? We know how painful that is when utility is the currency we use topurchase friendship. Utility alone demeans our dignity as human beings.

Thereclamation of ontology is an expression of this desire to learn the truth andto live by the truth, no matter how difficult and unpleasant it may be. It is aprocess, a journey and a conversion. We must make the transition to living whowe are rather than be defined by what we do. And without fail, I haveimpressed, Sunday after Sunday, homily after homily that it is from knowingwhat a thing is, for example, Holy Communion or knowing who we are, forexample, Catholics, that all our actions follow. Yes, we will fail but that isthe matter for confession.

Once,I had a conversation with a young man. He was not a practising Catholic and hewanted to have a Catholic wedding. He had been living in with his fiancé andthey both got civilly married on a particular date which sort of rhymed. Youknow the obsession people can have with numbers. The problem was that betweenthe date of the civil marriage and the date of the Church wedding would be ayear exactly. I told him that his status remained that of unmarried in the eyesof the Church and that if he lived with his so-called “wife”, he would have tocontracept. His response was simply, “Catholics are doing it nowadays, anyway”.That conversation had every mark of civility but nowhere near enlightment, notmy enlightment, but rather of the enlightment of the Church and of Christ ourLord.

Asyou can detect, our conversations are markedly “functional” instead of ontological.Therefore, the jubilee is not ending. Instead, our jubilee merely denotes along haul if ever we want to be the parish that is supposedly shaped accordingto Acts 2:42. The quotation is not a prescription of what the early Churchcommunity did but rather it is a description of what the early Church was. Itwas the Church Christ founded upon the Apostles and that was why it behaved inthat manner. Today, we pray for the grace to return to the being of truth sothat we may live the truth of being.

[1]Sometimes, the reticencein using “I” could be a fear that one has to live up to what one preaches andthat may be too troublesome. Why strive when you can cruise?

[2]Relookthe 1^st Sunday of Advent’s Collect. “All powerful God, increase our strength of will for doing good thatChrist may find an eager welcome at His coming and call us to His side in thekingdom of heaven”. The phrasing of the old translation seemed to assumethat we already have the strength of will and God merely adds a little more towhat we already possess. The truth is we have none.

[3]Consider this: A priesthas left the ministry and has been laicised. He can no longer function as apriest. But, if this ex-priest were to encounter a Catholic, lying on the roadand dying due to an accident, or a Catholic, whose death is imminent from aterminal disease, he can still absolve the penitent of his sins. Read Can 976: Any priest, even though he lacks thefaculty to hear confessions, can validly absolve any penitents who are indanger of death, from any censures and sins, even if an approved priest ispresent.

1st Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-11-27T23:38:00.001+08:00

For some people this is the moment they have been waiting for, for the last forty years. We are entering a new liturgical year and it corresponds to the liturgical changes that we have been preparing ourselves for. In feel, the quality of Advent is perhaps no different from the last couple of weeks. The focus towards the end of the liturgical year is appropriately the reckoning or the judgement at the end of time. This Sunday, the Gospel seems to continue along the same vein but now it is of wakefulness as we wait for the Lord’s coming. It is signalled by the change in colour making this the other season where violet, purple or lavender is featured. However, the shift is subtle because the mood is not as penitential as it is of expectation. Advent’s “penance” is associated with the air of joyful preparation for Christ’s coming at His birth but with the proviso that we keep in mind at all time His second coming.

As we embrace Advent, this spirit of joyful preparation is captured in the prayer of the new Collect which at the same time also gives us the shape of how we ought to prepare ourselves for the Christmas to come. To help us appreciate it, we need to contrast the new translation with the old.

But, before we do that, let me make a small digression with regard to the reception of the new translation. Part of our difficulty in appreciating the new translation may be found in its repetitiveness. The original translators, when they set out to translate Latin into English, took a stance that repetition was somewhat redundant. It was as if we should never say, “I love you”, twice. To praise God, to bless Him, to adore Him and to glorify Him, were all considered to be a tad over the top, to the point of mouthfulness. The criteria they adopted were greater accessibility and less formality and yet, our experience bears testimony otherwise as when we are in love, whispering sweet nothing into the ear of our beloved is considered the norm and we never tire of saying, “I love you”.

Does the profusion of words, in short the language used, make a difference in our approach to God? Listen to the “Opening Prayer”, which we now call, the Collect, of the previous translation of 1973/1975.

“All powerful God, increase our strength of will for doing good that Christ may find an eager welcome at His coming and call us to His side in the kingdom of heaven”.

The manner by which we address God is important. A philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said, “Language is the house of being”. Moreover, we ought to remember that the Word became flesh. Therefore, the language used is important and here, you will note that the prayer is straightforward. It speaks directly to God. However, prayers in the original Latin are often premised on a word of request, “quaesumus”, which can be translated into “beg, implore, beseech and pray”. When formal request is removed in our address to God, then the inevitable “right” [it’s my right kind of "right"] is presumed as the phrasing of the old translation seemed to assume that we already have the strength of will and God merely adds a little more to what we already possess. Imagine the hubris. The truth is we have none and this is reflected in the new translation.

“Grant Your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet Your Christ with righteous deeds at His coming, so that gathered at His right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom”.

What is the difference?

There is a strong resonance of scripture and this is important to note. Firstly, the Collect reminds us of the Gospel of the Ten Virgins. We are praying that our lamps will be filled with righteous deeds.

Secondly, to be gathered at His right hand is reminiscent of Christ who will come as the judge of the world. Here, we pray that, with God’s grace, we will be the sheep invited to sit at the right hand of Christ so as to inherit the kingdom prepared for those found to be rich in righteous deeds.

Thirdly, the poetry of the words leads us to imagine our running with resolve to meet the Lord. It is not that we just wait passively, in a manner of speaking, for the Lord’s coming but to remember that as He comes, we may, like the Virgins run, not aggressively, but eagerly forth to meet Him. Not passively, not aggressively but eagerly. The possessive pronoun “Your Christ” in the prayer also suggests the tenderness of our encounter with the Christ of the Father.

The prayer expresses the crux of Advent—how it is supposed to be shaped is encapsulated in this Collect. The preparation for Christ’s coming is intense because it makes the connexion between our faithful love for Him and neighbour: for as much as you do to the least of these, you do it to Me (Matt 25). You might begin to appreciate that the term “Collect” does justice to the prayer before we enter the Liturgy of the Word because it collects all our intentions so as to channel them in the direction of our resolve.

Finally you will always hear this repeated ad nauseam, and perhaps unwittingly, by Protestant-pleasing Catholics, that we do not know the Bible. It is true that we may not know the Bible the way our separated brothers and sisters quote it but we breathe, eat and drink sacred scripture. The Eucharist is the privileged place when and where we have always lived the Bible and now the new translation restores this living principle into our worship. The language of the new translation seeks to uncover the beauty of our faith by removing the grime of poor translation that has shrouded the splendour of truth that Catholicism has always been scriptural in her teaching, in her practice and in her worship.

Christ The King Year A

2011-11-20T23:36:00.000+08:00

There is a movie playing in the cinemas now called “Immortals”. It belongs to the genre that elevates violence into an entertaining art-form. [1] But that is not my interest. What piqued my interest, whilst reading the reviews, was the premise of the movie because it addresses how we acclaim Christ as King. [2]

The premise is located within a familiar phenomenon we call generation gap within which the conflict between the Titans and the Olympians arose. It was a conflict headed by Chronus, a Titan who was the father of Zeus, an Olympian. Caught in the middle of this conflict was Theseus, a stonemason bent on revenge against Hyperion, the cruel Heraklion King because Hyperion had savagely murdered the mother of Theseus. In this epic struggle between good and evil or between different generations of gods, the unspoken subtitle may simply be this: “man coming to the aid of gods”. The subtitle—man coming to the aid of god—is actually a story emasculation; a story where God is cut down to our size.

But cutting God down to size is not something new; it has been a process long in making. You can trace the beginning of this process to the onset of Modernity—an age characterised by the rise of Rationalism. Later I will give a working definition of Rationalism. For now, we may consider the Solemnity of Christ the King as an attempt to stop the march of an unintended development. The year was 1925. Pope Pius XI instituted this feast to remind Catholics that their true allegiance was to Christ and not to any ideology of that era, namely Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany that dared to claim allegiance absolutely.

But, there was more to countering the spread of the ideologies of Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, for these ideologies were merely the unintended effect of the march of Rationalism. It was a march about 400 years old. At the onset of the Enlightenment, one of the noble projects of the philosophers was to try to prove God’s existence using reason. However, the unintended effect of the Rationalism of the Enlightenment has been the downsizing or the emasculation of God. In trying rationally to prove the existence of God, the unintended result was finally the death of God according to Nietzsche.

God is dead and the downsizing today continues along the path of technology and pop psychology—both offshoots of Rationalism. How? On the one hand, God has been reduced to a concept and some of us are not really searching for Him as we are for a method, a form of yoga, a 10-step programme for arriving at this “concept” whom we believe to be God. On the other hand, if He is not the logical conclusion of a technique, perhaps, we should rap like Eminem: “Will the real Jesus Christ, Son of God, please stand up, please stand up?” But somehow He still cannot, not because He is dead but because we have shackled Him with the chains of cloying compassion, pleasant platitudes and pampered pardon. This Jesus Christ is a really sensitive New Age guru who is not God and certainly not capable of judging.

If both our fascination with techniques and our dabbling with psychobabble have not downsized God, then perhaps, they have rendered Him totally irrelevant. A persistent effort at making Christ more a mirror of ourselves has rendered Christ the King into Christ the Kitten.

What happens when God is cut down to our size or when He does not inspire us with a sense of overpowering awe? He cannot touch us and we will languish. When God is small or irrelevant, according to John Paul II, the reign of the Civilisation of Death has begun. Thus, the Son of God, whom we acclaim Him as King, is relevant. He cannot be a technique nor should He be reshaped according to the mould of the Gospel of Nice. Beyond the success of any method or psychobabble disguised as religion, we encounter the true King to whom we owe our allegiance and to whom we must give our life entirely.

This King, whilst He lays down His life for us, is also a King who judges the world. Before His throne of judgement, we will be asked if we have recognised Him at all and before Him, we will be pruned and when His shearing blades cut, there will be blood. It cannot be that we acclaim Him as King without blood, without sacrifice and without suffering. Christ as King has eternal implications because He is a call to serious discipleship. Thus, are you ready for the discipleship of Christ the King?

What should your answer be? The changes that are taking place in the liturgy may help shape your answer to this question. This week, the Latin-Rite English speaking Catholics will use for the last time a translation they have been accustomed to for the last 40 years. Next week, a new translation will kick in. For this parish, this is academic because we made the switch earlier. The point here is important. The language of the new translation has been criticised as circumlocutory, clumsy and clunky. In truth, the passive voice of the language, the gestures of striking our breast, the head bows at the name of Jesus, the Trinity and Mary and the profound bows and genuflexion when we recite the Creed are attempts by the Church to return to God what really belongs to God. [3] In a sense, our language and gestures indicate a resistance to downsizing or emasculating God, something which we have been doing in the last 40 years especially when we address Him in terms too familiar. Alongside this desire not to downsize or emasculate God, we no longer presume to sing in the name of God, as in the first person: “I am the Bread of Life” or “I, the Lord of sea and sky” because over-familiarity may lead to contempt. [4]

Contempt or irrelevance is to be expected because rationalism is insidious in its intent at downsizing or emasculating God. Here, I make a little digression to give the working definition of Rationalism by contrast rationalism with rationality. In rationality, reason is guided by faith [5] whereas in Rationalism, faith is determined [or circumscribed] by reason [6]. Now, the answer to the question of discipleship becomes clearer. Our willingness to embrace discipleship is in direct proportion to our willingness to restore to God the majesty, the reverence and the transcendence that is rightfully His.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] When killing someone has to be slowed down in order that we take in every gory detail then violence has become entertainment.
[2] Today is the last Sunday in Ordinary Time. The quality of the readings in these last couple of weeks has been quite apocalyptic in the sense that they point towards the “end-time”, the Eschaton. However, have you noticed the irony of how we frame life today? In the past, when craftsmen built, they seemed to build things to last. Here, I am always reminded of the Cathedrals of Chartres or Notre Dame. But, the buildings or edifices that lasted were not for themselves. Instead, they stood as testimony to eternity—some form of sacramentality. Their aim was not to be lasting. Their aim pointed to the last things. Now, consider the irony. All our gadgets have built-in obsolescence. They often break down as soon as the warranty period wears out. Yesterday, I was sitting in the Santa Maria della Strada Chapel, waiting for a wedding Mass to begin and I was looking at the sanctuary floor and thinking of today’s homily, etc. The edge of the sanctuary floor had broken because a pew had fallen upon it. I was reminded that everything we have was not made to last. We all know that and perhaps that explains our obsession with agelessness, timelessness, deathlessness, perfect life, perfect health and perfect body. Our obsession to be lasting is actually pointing us to that which is more important: the Last Things.
[3] Not that God needs it. But, we do because we are creatures. Sometimes, we are called “co-creators” etc etc… the fact remains that we are creatures before the Creator.
[4] The Jews have got this right. And we are following them. Check out the 29th June 2008 Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments’ letter to the Bishops’ Conferences on ‘the name of God’. It gives three brief “directives.” http://www.usccb.org/liturgy/NameOfGod.pdf. They address specifically “liturgical” situations (official public worship), rather than private reading of the Bible or the printed Bibles themselves. 1st directive: In liturgical celebrations, in songs and prayers the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton YHWH is neither to be used nor pronounced. 2nd directive: In modern translations of the Bible “destined for the liturgical usage of the Church,” the tetragrammaton should be translated with an equivalent of Adonai/Kyrios, such as “Lord” in English which has long been the practice of most biblical translations. 3rd directive: When Adonai and YHWH are used together in the Bible, then the translation (again for liturgical use) should be “Lord God,” following the practice of the ancient Greek and Latin translations of the Bible.
[5] Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. According to St Augustine, fides quaerens intellectum meaning that faith seeks understanding. Thus, faith uses reason to understand God and yet reason is guided by faith. [6] Here, faith is circumscribed by reason meaning that where reason cannot go, faith must stop. That is the shortcomings of a scientific mindset which seeks to divide faith and reason.

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-11-13T00:34:00.003+08:00

Last Sunday, I spoke of the internal disposition of a heart preparing for eternal life. This week, the Gospel illustrates, concretely through the parable of the talents, how this preparation may be lived out.

With this in mind, I would like to approach the Gospel not so much from the perspective of how we can use the talents but to understand what our response should be when we draw the short straw—like the man who got only one talent. How do we deal with 1 talent?

Our consumer world markets a vision of life whereby the pot is always depicted as brimming and overflowing. In short, we deserve more than 1 talent. So if you do not have it all, you can attain it. It is a false vision of life where utopia is not really utopian at all. St Thomas More, in his book, Utopia described this island in the Atlantic that possesses the perfect socio-politico-legal system. The operative phrase is “an island somewhere in the Atlantic” denoting that it is not real or better put, it remains a goal always one step ahead. It would, therefore, be an illusion to believe that utopia is achievable here on earth. This is confirmed by the etymology of the word itself, which in Greek means “not the place”.

Nevertheless, our consumer world continues to push an idea that life must be nothing but pleasant and suffering must disappear. And by no means is this utopian vision restricted to the consumer world. In fact, every aspect of modern life is gripped by a philosophy that man has the right and duty to construct a new world based on a rational foundation. Take note that rationality here is understood narrowly to be governed by functionality, efficiency and also the quality of life. [1] Sometimes, you hear the phrase “new world order” bandied about; a kind of mantra for a reality no less than heaven itself. This new world believes that the rational application of technology makes possible a world in which suffering and inequality can be wiped out. It is quite mechanical and deterministic and this kind of thinking is reflected in arguments like “You should know it what” as if knowing necessarily equates to doing. We know that is not really the case. Some of the most brilliant minds in history have also been the most evil. But, we constantly run into difficulty on account of this mechanistic, deterministic and linear thinking.

Anyway, in this utopian new world order, possibility becomes the determining criterion for the measure of how life is supposed to be shaped. As long as our technology can achieve it, then it is permissible. In this so-called heaven on earth, what is possible has been coalesced into what is permissible meaning that morality now is defined as it is permissible for man to do anything he is capable of.2 Now you can appreciate why the Church finds it increasingly difficult to argue, for example, against the use of in vitro fertilisation. In vitro fertilisation is not a new technology. But, in any discussions on the morality of life issues, the Church will always be depicted as the voice out of touch with progress.

Now listen to what Pope Benedict said in his first encyclical, “When we consider the immensity of others' needs, we can be driven towards an ideology that would aim at doing what God's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem”. Here the Pope may be cautioning us against a utopian attempt to fill the gap where apparently God has failed. Our technological prowess is really an indictment against a God who has failed miserably. For example, childlessness is an indication that God has failed and the cure can be any method that best secures conception. Recently, there was the media hype that the world was marking the birth of its 7th billion inhabitant? It was presented against a backdrop of unprecedented hunger in the world and that mankind was taking a toll on the resources of the world. The unspoken assumption was that God could not have provided enough for the world never mind the fact that hunger could have been the result of uneven distribution rather than of inadequate resources. Have you noticed how people often drink water from bottles and leave them half-full? Not even water or wasteful?

So, has God failed? No. Perhaps a more realistic vision of the world is that we can never realise utopia on earth and that is not because life is unfair. Even the most perfect life you can ever conceive of will be imperfect or flawed. If we banish all hatred or fill every stomach yet we know that that is not enough. Instinctively you know this. Why? Because we all have a part of heaven in us. Here, I am not advocating that we canonise the status quo by resignation. For example, I am not saying that women should accept that their husbands abuse them or vice versa. Nor am I suggesting passivism in accepting the injustice of racial or religious discrimination.

Many young people entering adulthood are also ensnared by a utopian vision that everything good has to be achieved in their lifetime. No wonder life is so stressful. And they may be unwittingly forced to subscribe to what is possible must be permitted because that is the only way to achieve utopia (perfect life) here. The parable of the talents highlights firstly that short straws are an existential given. It is a fact of life that God’s providence does not work according to our sense fairness. Secondly, we will never be able to achieve all that we want here in this world.

Thus, utopia is restored to its rightful place. For Christians, it belongs in the realm of the Eschaton. It means that what we hope to achieve may sometimes come only in the next life. So, if our idea of utopia is confined to this world, then our response in time would probably be cynicism or despair. If we accept that the world will always consist more of short straws than full pots, then it does not matter what we have been given. It matters how we use what we have for what needs to be done. We no longer gripe as if we have been dealt an injustice. Instead we set about doing what we can with what we have instead of thinking of what we can do with what we do not have. For us to achieve that Christian utopia, we need keep our eyes focused on Christ our Lord and we work with every bit of our being to make things right but keeping in mind also that what we do may never be enough. Yet we are at peace because we know and trust that Christ, in the end, will make right what we cannot in this world and He will reward us with what we cannot have in this world.

In conclusion, I am hesitant to say this. I have this lump on my neck. How I wish it would go away but sometimes I do not want to do anything not because I am despairing. Here, I am not advocating that those with cancer should do nothing about chemotherapy or those needing surgery should not consent to it. Rather, I am informed by the Eschaton that beyond what is considered proper and necessary care, I do not need to have a perfect body to enter heaven. I need a healthy soul and therefore my effort is to run the race for which I have entered. What is important is not what I have been given what is important is how I use what I have been given.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The quality of life argument is often used to justify euthanasia. Apart from that, it may be used also to justify eugenics, the science improving life even from the womb.
[2] The philosophy that says if you do not have it you can attain it thrives in this new morality where what is possible becomes permissible. The collapse of the wall between what is possible and what is permissible now renders any means as permitted as long as it helps the impossible becomes possible. As long as what is possible is permitted, then, technology can be co-opted by people who cheat and scam in a massive way. Since our life is premised on what can be done, then all manners of living should be respected. We call it “alternative lifestyle”. But life should be premised not only on “it can be done” but also on “should it be done”. This means we enter the territory of morality and this is where we will be accused of being judgemental if we do not subscribe to all possibilities available.

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-11-06T01:35:00.000+08:00

There is a Frank Sinatra feel to the readings these Sundays: “And now the end is near and so we face the final curtain”. You cannot miss the apocalyptic quality to the last few Sundays in Ordinary Time. It is a time of reckoning.

What shall it be when the time comes?

St Paul is of the opinion that those alive at the time of final reckoning will have no advantage over those who have died before. If that be the case, then the Gospel warns us not to be caught unawares at the final reckoning. Therefore, be prepared.

You hear, “be prepared!” and the next question is “for what?”.

This preparation may take place in the temporal sphere but it is cosmic in its implication because one is preparing for the future coming of the bridegroom. Even though the Gospel mentions about being “awake” when the bridegroom arrives, that is not really the focus. Instead it is to have enough oil. However, there seems to be an element of selfishness here because the virgins with enough oil seemed unwilling to share the excess oil they have. Schooled in Christian charity, we might consider this unwillingness as selfish. The truth is that the oil symbolises the interior preparation of the wise virgins. It has nothing to do with the external preparation like the provision that one takes along the journey. One may share one’s food with the poor or the hungry. One may alleviate another person’s physical condition but the inability of the wise virgins to share does not fall within this category. Instead, it is akin to how one may help another person by giving directions. I can tell you how to go to a place but it is you who must make the journey to that place!! It requires discipline and so the oil is symbolic of one’s interior life nurtured by prayers, expressed in good works and nourished by the sacraments and devotions. When the bridegroom arrives, we must have enough of oil.

Secondly, discipline requires commitment. However, our commitment compass might just need some realignment. It cannot be said that we are not committed if you consider all the things we are not only subjected to but also willingly subject ourselves to them. People go to the gym and they try to keep fit. They submit themselves to health regimes etc. All these are forms of commitment. The question to ask here is what our commitments are preparing us for? Bettering ourselves is a form of preparation but are we prepared just for life or are we prepared for eternal life? Many of us are caught up with preparation of a merely temporal kind.

Whatever we do, the goal is ultimately eternal life. And it requires that we judge wisely the things of this world. However, there seems to be an exponential increase in knowledge and know-how. We know a lot more and we also appear to have a solution to every conceivable ill. As a result of this exponential increase of knowledge and know-how we confuse facts with wisdom. Knowing “factoids” does not make us wise and the best way to describe this confusion is through the analogy of a jigsaw-puzzle. More and more, knowledge is becoming so specialised that people are having all the pieces of a puzzle but they have no “master-plan” to help piece them together. [1]

Furthermore the application of know-how is not an indication of wisdom. We are quite knowledgeable but not wise. In fact, our younger generation have at their fingertips so much more technical knowledge than we can ever imagine. But they are not wiser. Thus, to gain eternal life we need the wisdom to know what is necessary for us to reach our heavenly goal and wisdom is aided by our possession of knowledge but it is not constituted solely by it.

Today, the wise virgins symbolised our preparation for eternal life. We should live our lives in such a way that at any time, when Christ the Lord appears in the horizon or is already at the door we are ready. It means we are ready to die or we are ready to give our lives for Christ. How many of us can say that at the moment of death, we are at our best. This “best” is not a reference to “perfection”. Instead, it refers to our conscience. A clear conscience is the best preparation we can make with regard to the Bridegroom’s arrival. Live as if today might just be our last day on earth. That way you will find it easier to desire a clear conscience.

FOOTNOTE:
[1] Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit but wisdom is not putting it in a salad. This is what the Greeks call paraprosdokian, that is, a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected. It is frequently used in a humorous situation. A good example of a paraprosdokian is Where there is a will, I want to be in it.

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-10-30T22:04:00.000+08:00

It feels like a priest-bashing Sunday. But, we deserve it. The first reading issues an ominous warning against priests. Christ in the Gospel criticised the external focus on rituals and outward appearances of the scribes and Pharisees. He even prohibited calling anyone master, father and teacher. Catholics, according to Protestants, are certainly guilty of the unbiblical practice of calling priests “fathers”. Perhaps it is good to explore the Catholic priesthood, what it means that priests are called “fathers” and maybe learn a little more about the meaning of vocation.

I begin with a phenomenon. Have you noticed these days at traffic lights that motorcyclists will disregard the red light and proceed to cross it when they see no oncoming traffic? At that moment, we might just shake our heads and lament the breakdown in law and order. [1] But, apart from lawlessness, why would a motorcyclist jump the red light? Take note that in general, laws are enacted for order in society. So, we might just “jump the red light” when it is erected in the middle of nowhere, for example, in a paddy field. As we say, laws are meant for Man, that is, Sabbath is made for Man and not Man for Sabbath. But, take note that jumping the red light along Jalan Gasing into the Federal Highway is not an instance that Sabbath is made for Man.

Then, what reason could we adduce for the blatant disregard for laws? It arises from a mistaken notion of what authority is. A breakdown in society’s structures will take place when we confuse power with authority. Authority is a moral force. It is even captivating as we read in Lk 4:32, “His teaching made a deep impression on them because He spoke with authority”. Thus, the proper exercise of power will ultimately uplift and enhance people’s lives.

Power, unlike authority, could be an expression of naked aggression. Libya, under Gaddafi, was a good example. His power was basically authoritarian and it burdens people with fear. This was the criticism of Christ against the Pharisees and the scribes. They loaded unto others the burdens which they themselves did not want to carry.

Whenever an authority is morally bankrupt, it often has to resort to aggressive power to rule. When that happens, the exercise of power, the discharge of duty is achieved through fear. For example, whenever the religious police knock on our door, we cower in fear and sadly, our country is governed mostly through the exercise of power. Many of us are compliant not because we consent to be governed but because we are afraid of the state’s aggression.

In general, the extent of our descent into lawlessness is the measure of how we have mistaken power as authority. What has brought about this confusion?

In a particular liturgical celebration elsewhere, the 9-day novena crowd was big and the Holy Communion was brought out in a Tiffin carrier. [2] The merit of using a Tiffin carrier is not my concern here. Why? It was an issue of practicality because there were simply not enough ciboria for use to distribute Holy Communion. But, practicality has implications. Today, we seem to engage the world from a purely practical point of view; deemed necessary for survival. But, we forget that it does not take much to slide from being practical to being functional. When decisions are based on the criterion of practicality alone, we become functional. It is efficient and you might ask what is wrong with that.

Now, imagine a priest who is functional. It is good because he can accomplish a lot. But, if he is only functional, then, he will need space for his personal life. Space does not denote the rest that a priest needs. Christ needed rest and He was said to have escaped into the hills to pray and presumably to rest. What I mean by space is the separation or dichotomy between who a priest is and what he does. He has to create a division between his public and private life. This division between who a priest is and what he does has implication for the exercise of authority and power. [3]

We often use the words authority and power interchangeable. They are connected but they have different meanings. Authority speaks of the right to exercise power and it is the source of one’s power, whereas, power refers to actualisation of authority. In other words, authority is ontological because it refers to whom a person is. Power, on the other hand, is functional because refers to what a person does.

Authority flows from who we are. And who are we? We are made in the image and likeness of God. The more we resemble that image, [4] the more authoritative we will be. Chfrist acted the way He did because He was perfectly the Son of God. Furthermore, authority is not only ontological. It is also derived, as Christ derived His by virtue of being Son; the Pharisees and scribes theirs by virtue of being spokesmen of God. Likewise, Christian authority is God-given as pointed out in both the 1st and 2nd readings. St Paul referred to his authority of acting and speaking in the name of God and the priests of Israel were criticised for their failure to listen to source of their authority who is God Himself.

From this perspective, Catholic priests are called “fathers” because they exercise their authority in the name of God the Father and not because they have power. With regard to authority, we instinctively give our consent to people who behave in an authoritative way and not in an authoritarian manner. As mentioned earlier, authority is captivating because it is persuasive whereas power is intoxicating because it can corrupt the person who has it as it oppresses those who have to bear with it. Look at the Pope. He is powerless but he is authoritative as young Catholics have noted at the recent World Youth Day.

Christ was not against the exercise of authority. In fact, He Himself said, “Do what they tell you and listen to what they say”. He was not against calling anyone father, master or teacher. He stood for credibility and against the abuse of power. Perhaps, we can better grasp that the crisis the Church faces today is a crisis of authority. It is a crisis of authority not only because priests have exerted undue power. Primarily, it is a crisis of authority because priests have become mere functionaries. When we function, we naturally turn to techniques (like the technique of how to be a better priest or a better father or mother or manager). We focus on how-how and capabilities. We are performers or we are personalities forgetting who we really are: in persona Christi.

The issue is not calling priests fathers. It is more fundamental. In our success-oriented and achievement obsessed society, we have come to define ourselves by what we can do rather than allow our identity to determine our behaviour. An analogy is a husband. He may function as husband by being protective and supportive financially. Just because he does the things necessary does not mean he a husband. Instead, he is husband and that is why he does all these things. Identity determines behaviour.

The crisis of authority reveals a deeper crisis of identity and not of function. A devastating effect of this crisis for the Church has been the decimation of religious brothers and sisters. As we define ourselves narrowly by what we do, brothers are defined by what they cannot do. They are not priests. Sisters are no better. Many sister congregations are named after Mary because she is the model of attentiveness to Christ. Therefore, sisters are primary called to this vocation before all else they are capable of undertaking. Forgetting who they are, they have removed their habits to try to blend in with lay people.

The Gospel today challenges all priests and most of all, bishops to rediscover the ontological foundation of their authority and prophetically exercise it through their magisterium, their governance and their worship. Their authority is best manifested through the triple ministry to teach, to shepherd and to sanctify. What is required is not a rehabilitation of authority as it is a rehabilitation of the exercise of it. And it requires that priests begin to live who they are and not just function according to what they are called to do.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] In general, there is a pervasive sense that the breakdown of law and order may also accounts for how scammers confidently swindle unsuspecting victims or how burglars brazenly break into homes to rob and steal.
[2] Originated from India, they are lunch boxes that come in 2 or 3 tiers and widely used in Malaysia in the 50s and 60s. In Bombay they are called “dabbawalas”. In today’s green world, tiffin carriers make environmental sense.
[3] The critique of Christ against the scribes and the Pharisees refers to this divide. They are public figures with private lives.
[4] We resemble the image by contemplating and imitating who God is. It may explain why Mother Theresa and her sisters usually spend enough time before the Blessed Sacrament so that they can learn to recognise God in others.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-10-23T15:41:00.001+08:00

Just as we enter into the final phase of the Ordinary Time, we are reminded of what is important. It is the commandment to love. The scriptural context for this remains that of “testing” as the enemies of Christ were looking for any excuse to get Him into trouble. From the corpus of 613 commandments found in the Torah [the Pentateuch] Christ drew two commandments—from Deuteronomy (6:5) and Leviticus (19:18). He did not discard all the others but made these two the foundation for the rest. In this, Christ remained orthodox and yet He universally widened the definition of a neighbour from embracing only an Israelite to all Gentiles also.

What does it mean to love God and neighbour? A question to elaborate the commandment will usually set us thinking in terms of “how”, meaning, concretely, how I may love God and neighbour. The first reading is a good example as it lists the “do’s” and “don’ts” of loving our neighbour. But, put aside the “how”, you would find that the commandment actually describes our fundamental orientation to both God and our neighbour. Now, the question is: “Why do we immediately resort to thinking of the “how””?

For us, the answer lies in a characteristic of the modern mindset which may be termed as a “show-proof” mindset arising as it were from a “scientific” mentality. A premise of science is to show forth proof for any statement that one makes. With regard to God, in the last 400 years or so, we have actually reasoned Him out of our universe since we cannot scientifically prove the existence of God. With God out of the picture, our focus shifts to humanity expressed through a commendable concern for the world. Without God, humanism seems to be at its best, doing what is necessary for the world to be a better place. However, one of the consequences of a secular humanism is a disdain for religiosity; which is an expression of the show-proof mentality. How? Take a look at the phenomenon of the dying churches, especially of Europe, filled with old women praying the rosary. They pray so much but what do they amount to? Nothing. In fact, people who pray so much are usually those who have no “connection” with the world outside. And worse, the criticism against those who pray or those who frequent church is that they do not practise what they preach. In short, the commandment to love God and neighbour has been reduced by a “show-proof scientific” mentality into a secular humanist project. If you love God, prove it by what you do (justice) and not only that, justice has become the only way to prove that God exists.

But any secular humanist project, any ethics without God is bound to fail. According to Pope Benedict, he says that “Man can build a world without God, but this world will end by turning against him”. We have seen ample examples of this project in the last 150 years. Nazism was a good example as Hitler tried to “construct” a perfect race. But, the most glaring one was the socialist project called Communism. Today, the EU may be described as another humanist attempt at building a world which is both just and equitable.

In order for the humanist project to succeed, it needs to return God to the centre of its vision. In fact, true humanism begins by acknowledging that Man is made in the image and likeness of God. Thus, humanism at its best is when Man discovers himself loved by God in such way that he responds joyfully by loving God and embracing God’s love for humanity.

Perhaps, you can see how the commandment given by Christ is more a definition of who we are than what we do meaning how we behave flows from an understanding and acceptance of who we are as loved by God. It is as Pope Benedict would say, “It is the reality of God that reveals and illustrates the mystery of Man”. Therefore, our love for humanity is a logical consequence of our fundamental attitude towards God. If you cannot love someone, it is not a proof that you do not love God. Maybe it is better explained by the fact that you have not arrived at loving God enough. And this is where many of us are at. We struggle to love God in our lives. It may be the greatest struggle of our lives.

The current crisis we have with regard to abject poverty and social deprivation is an indication of the crisis of orientation. If we want to live the commandment that Christ has enjoined upon us, we must return to what is fundamental. We begin by returning to God and not focusing on the “how” of action, no matter how pressing the situation may be.

Do not be surprised by what I have said because we are too quick to embrace activism. What do I mean? There is a flood in Bangkok, what shall we do? Do we pray first [ie, focus on God] before we think of what we need to do? Must we do one first before the other? No, by all means, reach out to support any flood relief work the Thais might embark upon. The point I am trying to make is reaching out to support the Thais in their flood relief action and much of what we do with regard to loving our neighbour (advocacy or activism) may just be natural expressions of our sincerity and not necessarily the articulation of our love for God.

Why is sincerity not enough? Firstly, ethics without God is incomplete. Secondly and more importantly, it does not take much to demoralise an activist especially when he or she faces the gap between ideal and reality. A good example is just before Mass. Some of us, a few of us, actually, park our cars in such a way that the residents of Section 10 have great difficulty removing their cars. They have routinely complained to us. A few of us give all of us a bad name. We need to anchor our love for neighbour on our love for God. It explains why saints are never surprised whereas a cynic is a failed idealist. Christians will consistently and constantly fall short of the mark and the saints are never surprised because they have the right compass. For them, the key word is “re-turning” to God—signifying a life-long struggle of orienting one’s compass towards God. In summary, love for our neighbour, no matter how hard it may be, will supernaturally follow when we have a right attitude with God and then the first reading’s “do’s” and “don’ts” become the logical expression of that love for God. Mother Theresa’s sisters spend long hours before the Blessed Sacrament. Their charity is founded very much upon their love for Jesus Christ.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-10-16T16:13:00.002+08:00

It is said that the outcome of the Gospel encounter between Christ and the Pharisee-Herodian cohort formed the basis for the modern concept of the separation between Church and State.

The context of the encounter was clearly entrapment. The historical setting was the tax revolt but the undercurrent was deeply theological because the episode took place after Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It was either God and His divine laws were supreme or the Roman Emperor and his pagan laws were supreme. For Christ, it was a Catch-22 situation. On one side of the divide, to condone paying taxes would tantamount to collaboration with a foreign occupying power and would certainly alienate Himself from crowd for it had just acclaimed Him “King”. On the other of the divide, to censure or condemn taxes was synonymous with advocating revolt and thus incur the wrath of Rome.

The coin exposed the hypocrisy of those who perhaps harboured a secret desire to incite an uprising. Why? Their ease at producing a denarius betrayed their compliance with the system imposed by the foreign occupying power. Those who were intent on entrapping Christ were themselves trapped by own inconsistency. In other words, if you hate your enemy that much, why would you use the thing of your enemy, in this case, give consent to the very instrument of your oppression?

At one level, the lesson to learn is centred on the consistency or the coherence between what you stand for and what you do. The Pharisees and the Herodians were humiliated by the imposition of the tribute tax and to top off their hypocrisy, they not only possessed the very coinage of their humiliation, they also brought the profane denarius into the sacred Temple.

The reality of this inconsistency is not something revolutionary. If there is anything predictable about human behaviour, it is our inconsistency. We should never be surprised. This is important because our political scene is sullied by greedy and dishonest politicians. And nothing is more damaging to national life than a deep cynicism born of despair. But, inconsistency is not restricted to the political sphere. It is the existential condition of being human. Our economic, social and religious spheres suffer the same.

At another level, we may speak of the separation of powers. Here we apply the principle of equity—an expression of justice. “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar” briefly summarises in particular, the just relationship between Christianity and secular power or, in general, between any religion and State.1 This division is useful because it helps to limit religious interference in secular matters and vice versa. In this country, where the line is not properly drawn, we constantly run into the same trouble again and again especially, when it involves the alleged conversion of a deceased.

Is there anything that points beyond the challenges of consistency and the separation of powers? In the first reading, we are directed beyond what belongs to Caesar. The theme “The Lord of History” suggests a larger picture that ultimately everything belongs to God. Put it in another way, temporal or secular powers are believed to be a reflexion of God’s governance of the world. At one time, especially during the Middle Ages, it was the basis for thinking of the divine rights of kings whose legitimacy to rule was derived from God Himself. The king was God’s regent on earth. Whatever the merit of such a doctrine, as we no longer accept it, the people assented to earthly authorities because they were meant to represent a vision of God for humanity. We render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar only because Caesar’s authority is supposed to be a reflexion of God’s sovereignty. Can you imagine how much God’s will be glorified if all secular powers [read = secular powers] know their place in society. They are not only our humble servants but they are also God’s regent and they are answerable also to God.

Hence, the discussion between Christ and His opponents should not be narrowly confined to the question of the separation between Church and State. Instead, the roles of Church and State are oriented to God in such a way that religion, in particular the Church, is to guide and inform consciences [now you understand where Fr OC was coming from] and thereby serve as check and balance to the power of the State. The State’s role is to protect the freedom of religious practices. You know how far we are from this ideal.

Finally, I am not advocating the formation of a “Christian” state. I am merely pointing out that the separation between Church and State is relative and not absolute. Both religion and State are necessary and at their best must allow Man to live his fullest potential in this world, which according to St Augustine, is called the City of Man so as to prepare him for the next world, which St Augustine also named as the City of God. It means that everything, even Caesar’s rule, must be brought under the rule of God for He is the Lord of history. We have a long painful and winding road ahead of us.

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-10-02T09:27:00.003+08:00

The vineyard is the leitmotif that runs through both the 1st reading and the Gospel. But, there is a twist in the ending. In the 1st reading, God finally rejects the vineyard. Instead of justice and integrity, it produces the sour grapes of iniquity and oppression. The Gospel ends not in the rejection of the vineyard. It ends with a rejection of those who first rejected the keystone who is none other than Christ Himself. The early Christians read the parable in reference to themselves as the new tenants who have replaced the rejected ones.

However, the Gospel is not merely a historical account of the past for if read historically, we may just arrive at the altar of smug satisfaction. We are the new Israel so it seems. Actually, the drama surrounding the vineyard is a form of typology in which the acceptance or rejection is not determined in the historical past because those who became the new tenants through time could also pick up the bad habits of the previous tenants. The Old Israel may not be the only rejected tenants. Christians, who consider themselves the New Israel, too can be rejected.

So, what lesson can we learn today? It is all about rejection: God’s and ours.

Firstly, the basis of God’s rejection is quite simple. It is centred on the keystone upon “Whom”, not upon which, we have to build our lives. The old tenants were displaced for their failure to accept Christ as the new keystone in the vineyard of the Lord. By the way, the plan since the beginning of creation has always been centred on Christ. Even the Jews accept this. The only difficulty is they rejected Christ as the Christ they had been waiting for. Whilst Christians may like to consider themselves as the new tenants because they have accepted Christ, the truth is, many Christians who bear the name of Christ may very well be Christians in name only. Therefore, it is possible to reject Christ in our lives even if we called ourselves Christians. In truth, it is never God who first reject us but it is we who reject God first.

Secondly, there is a subtle form of rejection that many Christians do not sufficiently think through. Christians may not reject Christ but they have rejected the institutional Church. Consider the circumstances surrounding particular Churches [meaning a diocese or a parish] especially one which is racked by scandals of every kind. Poor moral leadership has been cited as a cause of people rejecting the Church. The very criticism of hypocrisy is often hurled against the Church’s hierarchy. Sometimes the Church is considered not only to be out of touch with reality but worse, she is an expression of everything which Christ stood against—a Church concerned with material wealth against the so-called Church of Christ who was born poor; a Church corrupted by honour and privilege rather than a Church steeped in humble service.

The result is a rejection of the institution of the Church seemingly in favour of personal faith in Christ. I do not need to be encumbered by the institutional Church. In fact, I do not need to go to Church to believe in Christ. After all, I can pray on my own.

It is true that leaders of the Church may be guilty of scandals, meaning, a person’s behaviour causes another person to sin. But, scandals may not be the reason for people rejecting the institutional Church. Usually, it takes less. Like the less-than-cordial reception by a parish. Like making the announcement that Holy Communion is reserved for baptised and practising Catholics. Or the priest is too harsh in the Confessional, like chastising a penitent. A little slight is enough to reject the Church. Do you know how many people have left the Church because their queries on marital difficulties have not been handled properly?

This is not to say that we do not need to be welcoming, gentle or tactful. The point is, no matter how valid an argument may be, the rejection of the institutional Church is a form of abdication of one’s responsibility. It sends a message that one’s faith in Christ is dependent on the action of another. One is literally saying that I reject Christ because of the bad behaviour of some Christians. There is a jump here and so let me rephrase what I have just said. Can my faith in Christ be expressed without the institutional Church? The answer is no. It is not possible because Christ the keystone is never without His Church—the Bridegroom is never without his Bride, the Head is never without His Body. Rejection of the institutional Church is the rejection of Christ Himself. There is an organic unity between Christ and His Church that many Catholics do not fully appreciate—a unity which is sacramentally manifested through the institutional Church—concretely made up of the hierarchy and the laity. You cannot love Christ without loving His Church.

If there is one thing we need to accept with regard to the institutional Church, it is that her sons and daughters will always be consistent in failing. Sin is our addiction and we should never be surprised that members of the Church succumb to their weakness. Accepting this reality will not only help us keep faith in Christ and His Church—His Bride and our beloved Mother. It also prevents us from placing our responsibility to be good, to be true and to be noble, on others, on whether or not they are living up to what we perceive to be the acceptable Christian moral standard. The failure, weakness or sin of others is not a valid reason to reject the institutional Church and ultimately Christ Himself. In that way, we can progress from sin to grace. Otherwise, by rejecting the Church, what we do is to blame others for our rejection of God and in that way prevent us from embracing what is necessary for change, for conversion and for our salvation.

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-09-25T22:11:00.003+08:00

The Gospel and the 2nd Reading present us with contrasting pictures. The theme Christ obedient unto death is derived from the 2nd Reading. The great Christological hymn of St Paul’s letter to the Philippians describes the Incarnation, the act of Divine Condescension, as an act of obedience. Christ who willingly surrendered His divinity to assume the condition of a slave is held up as the supreme model of obedience.

The Gospel, on the other hand, lays bare a scenario closer to our reality. Our struggle with obedience is exemplified by the second son whose yes remains only in word and unrealised in deed. Whilst the 2nd Reading proposes an ideal, the Gospel reveals a painful truth of man’s struggle to match his actions with his words.

Why is there always a gap between what we say and what we do?

Ricoeur, a French philosopher tries to understand the source of the gap. To explain the gap, he turns to the three “Masters of Suspicion”—Frederic Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. These three thinkers were searching for authentic consciousness in the sense that they were interested to know the reason for the mismatch between word and deed. They suspected that the lapse between word and deed is caused by our passion for power, our infantile craving for sex and also insatiable desire for money. If that be the case, then we must adduce impure motives to people’s intention. No one can be trusted because there are always selfish reasons for one’s actions.

Sadly, this is confirmed in the fields of politics—abuse of authority; in the area of psychology—sexual satisfaction; and economy—selfish interest. Examples are a dime a dozen as they come to through electronic media. Daily we are fed a staple of how evil men have subverted the good for their own purposes. We are being warned every day not to trust someone who is “kind” because kindness is a prelude to some nefarious plan to rob or to rape.

Christ, in obedience to the Father’s will, proposes that the gaping chasm between word and action does not need to be filled by power, sex or money. Instead, our temptations actually reveal a craving for integrity. The more tempted we are by all these, the more we are crying out for integrity. What is integrity?

St Ignatius, when he speaks of love, says that love must be seen in deeds rather than in words. The way he speaks acknowledges that the gap is existential, that it is a given. It will always be there and the only way we can narrow the gap is to match our actions with our words. The word Purgatory may not mean much to Catholics these days. But, the basis for our belief in Purgatory rests on the gap which has to be narrowed. When we cannot, Purgatory does the trick for us in the afterlife. As such, in the context of presenting Christ as the ideal of obedience to the Father’s will, we begin with the most basic requirement of being true to our words. In short, the challenge of obedience in our context is to live lives of integrity.

This is where the blushing comes in. All of us have dirty secrets we keep from others. Tell me you don’t have and I call you Christ. In other words, we all are hypocrites; much like the second son who says yes but does not fulfil his promise. We all live double lives and it is a matter of degree. And here is the rub. The painful truth is this: the more we lament that our politicians are corrupt and that the country is in such dire political straits, the more we ought to look at ourselves. There is a correlation between how bad we perceive the country to be and where we are at the level of personal integrity. We speak of corruption at national level but we find little or no problem bribing a policeman for a traffic misdemeanour.

But, there is hope. The phenomenon of Reality TV is not just revelatory. Jerry Springer, Big Brother and Survivor, even though they follow a predictable pattern that dirty linen has to be publicly paraded, that predictable pattern may actually mask a deeper desire. The self-destructive drive to expose oneself may just be a cry for integrity. Reality TV, even if it were driven by a desire to come clean, cannot fulfil man’s desire for integrity, a desire which can be answered quite simply by Catholic Confession.

Christ as model of obedience challenges us to narrow the gap between our word and action. Where do I stand on the counter of integrity? Some of us mistakenly believe that as long as we do not cheat, steal or lie then we are OK. In short, we believe integrity to be merely a personal and private affair. But, the fact remains that evil abounds because “men of integrity” remain silent.

In summary, the path to obedience begins with faltering steps towards integrity. Obedience is not merely abnegating one’s will or surrendering one’s life. It grows with integrity. My word must become my bond. It is a struggle and it will always be and the path begins not with a grand vision, not found in self-help books, will not come about by thinking about it in the future. The ideal of obedience to God’s will can only be lived out by the reality of our integral lives. It begins with faltering steps and never without hope because regular Confessions and faithful attendance of Mass is our sure help and strength in this path towards integrity and finally, obedience to the Father’s will.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-09-18T22:03:00.002+08:00

The theme says the “Generous love of God”. What does it mean when we speak of God’s generous love because the parable, if it were an illustration of it, is really an affront to our sense of justice? In fact, the Gospel passage finds a parallel in a current crisis afflicting the financial world. Take a look at the European Union. The citizens of Germany may be wondering why they should be punished for the fiscal delinquency of Greece.

We live in an age of rights… and it is not just "I am right all the time" but rights, as in merits and entitlements, that flow from principles of justice and equity. But, if you pause to think further, you would find, more than ever, the vocabulary of merits and entitlements spelt with the alphabets of the economy.

Today, we are invited to reflect, not on how the principles of justice are to be upheld but to fathom the depth of God’s generous love. Two points to be made here. Firstly, this exercise does not mean that the principles of justice and equity are abrogated. If they were, pretty much of the Gospels will not make sense. Secondly, the parable is indeed most challenging because we have laboured under an unjust system which does not recognise merit but instead rewards mediocrity. Many of you understand what it is like to work hard only to have your entitlement denied by nothing except the accident of a wrong skin colour.

In this context, to plumb the depth of God’s generous love, we need to get away from a calculative mode of thinking. Do you know how our heads are naturally wired to calculating or measuring? To say that one has understood, we sometimes speak in terms of “I have figured it out”. But, once we have moved away from trying to “figure” out God’s generosity, meaning, to limit Him with our measures, a bigger picture emerges as echoed in the First Reading—the heavens are as high above earth as my ways above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.

Once our mind is set free from limiting God’s generosity, we begin to appreciate better how God could send His Son to die for us. And here is the irony. Consider the protagonists in the parable in terms of Jews and Christians. Christians are the Johnnies-come-lately and yet we appear to enjoy the same benefits as the Jews. God made a covenant with Abraham and the people of Israel. And, He generously extends that same faithful covenant to the Apostles, the early Church and now to us.

The lesson we derive from appreciating God’s generous love is that He invites us to His standard. Our generosity is often determined by just deserts meaning that to every man, what he deserves. Thus, merit is an important criterion to determine what one deserves. A good example would be to hear the justification of 11th Sept… that the Americans deserved what they got. Our sense of revenge is actually built on this kind of deserts like the Cantonese would say: “Serves you right”. If that be our standard, then God’s generosity in the Gospel parable would seem perverse.

The truth is that God’s generosity is a response to our needs. To every man, what he needs. He really does not treat us according to what we deserve. If He did, where would we be? In fact, the reason so many people we do not like are still alive--rapists, robbers and the fat woman whose name is spelt with an R?—is testament to a God who does not treat us according to our sins. On the contrary, this God comes to save us according to our need because His justice hinges on unmerited grace.

This explains "in God, mercy and justice meet". His mercy is tempered by justice and His justice sets the limits of mercy. I use the phrase hesitatingly. It means the limit is not really set by God. He will stoop down to save us because He recognises our need to be saved. The gratuity and generosity of His love is limited not by God but by our response. It means that we must, as the first reading says, “Seek the Lord while He is still to be found”. God’s generous love is both a gratuitous gift as well as a task. He comes to us because we need Him whether we acknowledge it or not but His love can never violate our freedom. The ball is really in our court.

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-07-31T11:36:00.002+08:00

Recently, I preached a short homily that disturbed some parishioners. I shall repeat an edited version here because it might challenge our unquestioned assumptions about who Christ is and what God is capable of. In a way, I am engaging your “backgrounds” because our backgrounds/assumptions power how we behave and thus, they have implications for faith.

This is what I preached in relation to the miracle in today’s Gospel. There was really no miracle of the “multiplication”. It seemed that people had brought picnic baskets which they had somehow kept under their robes. The miracle, if it could be termed as such, was Christ convincing the crowd to pull out their “selfish” baskets and made them share their picnic with everyone. They all ate as much as they liked and then, the best part was, Christ taught them all to sing “Kumbayah” as they all swayed and twirled in this one big love-fest of dance on beds of flowers enveloped by a swirling haze of ganja smoke.

If it was really a miracle, it should be known as the miracle of shame and persuasion. Christ shamed those who had brought more than enough and persuaded them to share with those who did not make provision for a whole day spent in the remote location.

The question is why do we, especially priests, find it difficult believing that this miracle really took place?

We live an incredulous or unbelieving age today. Not only do we not believe in people’s kindness or goodness. There is always something insidious about people’s motivations. It is like we have a particular sort of lens which reads the worse into people’s intentions. That is understandable because the world seems to have become less friendly. Evil men have subverted the good for the own evil purposes and as such, the world is so much more a dangerous place. [1] An example of evil men perverting the good is people who come dressed as Telekom employees to rob houses.

But, that is not really the reason why we do not believe in the possibility of this miracle. We also seem to have an interpretative lens that denies the past what we cannot conceive of today. It means that miracles must be ruled out simply because that which cannot be replicated or repeated in the laboratory cannot be true.

It is a form of prejudice against the supernatural—a reductionism which demythologises anything that cannot be explained scientifically. Anything supernatural in the Bible, the Church, and the saints have to be re-formulated for the logical, rational and scientifically-minded people. For example, St Francis Xavier was said to have raised the dead. Today, we downplay that account of his holiness and attribute it to legendary embellishment.

This practice of demythologising can also be an expression of political correctedness that has gone rampantly wild. The fact that this miracle can take place proclaims clearly the divine origin of Christ. In a way, demythologising is a subtle denial of the incarnation. This person whom we called Jesus Christ has to be explained away as merely a man who was the best of men. He achieved the fullest potential of what a man could be and therefore was the best reflexion of divinity. In the context of religious intolerance and the need for sensitivity, we now have a Christ more palatable or acceptable to all religions. [2] The fact that Christ is God has a decisiveness to Him which can be threatening.

As they say, a fact lost in interpretation is that the multiplication of the loaves is the only miracle, apart from the Resurrection told by all four Gospels. If shame, persuasion and sharing were that important would they not have been recorded in at least one of the Gospels? Furthermore, the Gospel did not record any dialogue between Christ and the crowd. The only “conversation” recorded was between Christ and the disciples and from today’s Gospel we get simply this fact: Jesus took the five loaves and the two fish, gave thanks and said the blessing, broke the bread, and He handed them to His disciples. Where do you hear the echo of this? You hear this precisely in the Institution Narrative: “On the night he was betrayed, He took bread and gave you thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to His disciples, and said”.

A miracle is a miracle. All the Gospels record many that Christ performed. But, do you know that only 7 of them are selectively recorded in John’s Gospel. The number 7 points to divine completeness as each miracle is only possible because the Man is also our Lord, Saviour and God.

Finally, the idea that the miracle that Christ performed was more about sharing highlights or emphasises something which is relevantly significant and perhaps necessary for us to hear; that there is enough food. If only we learn to share and not waste, the resources of the world would be enough for everyone. But, that misses the point. This miracle, even though it revolves around food, is not about sharing—noble as the idea may sound. Rather the miracle points to the stupendous power of God to effect that which is beyond our imagination and clearly beyond the narrow scope of our scientific expectation. This is not an entirely a negative statement because we subscribe to rationality. As such, we have difficulty suspending the laws of physics. But, the irony is we do suspend the laws of physics because we accept miracles of healing attested at Lourdes, for example. But, the multiplication of loaves, it is a bit too much of a suspension of the laws of physics.

The fact that priests have tried explaining away the miracle may indicate a crisis of faith. Even if we speak of faith, our faith in the supernatural is closer to the idea of God as a soft-drink dispensing machine. It is quite mechanical; the mechanics almost suggested by the 1st Reading. We pray, therefore God must answer. If God does not answer our prayer, we turn to Lilian Thoo and her world of fengshui or we turn to the ubiquitous or all-present “bomohs”. Our faith cannot stand up to the vicissitudes as poignantly described St Paul in the 2nd Reading. We struggle to come up to the faith of St Paul.

Ultimately, this miracle is linked to another miracle. In fact it is a prelude to the greatest of all miracles: bread will now become no less than the same substance that walked 2000 years ago. To explain it away reveals our schizophrenic faith. We believe in the Eucharist but have difficulty accepting the multiplication of loaves and fish. So, if you believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, then as the colloquial Chinese would say, the multiplication of the loaves and the fish would be simply “sap sap sui le”. [No sweat]. In other words, Christ will not even break a sweat on His brow if he multiplied loaves and fish.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is ironical that the tagline for the Transformers is “more than meets the eye”. The Transformers are the logical expressions of a scientific and linear rationality—rationality which thinks logically in a linear way so much so that it excludes intuition. Thus, the tagline appears to preserve a certain degree of intuition that accepts what looks logically so might not be so. What we have is that our intuition cannot intuit beyond what we already presume reality to be… hostile and unfriendly. The fundamental position we take is that world is a cruel place and it cannot be trusted.
[2] In the same manner, the Resurrection is explained away by appealing to some “naturalistic” descriptions. For example, the Apostles underwent an intense spiritual experience after the death of Christ so much so that they began to believe what they wanted to believe.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-07-17T13:18:00.002+08:00

Today should be dedicated as a “Don’t be judgemental” Sunday. This suggestion is premised on the idea of a God who is a merciful judge. We hear it in the first reading where God’s justice is juxtaposed with His leniency. What is more, the Gospel portrays a field where wheat and weed can grow side by side. In the light these two readings, what does it mean that one should not be judgemental?

If you take a moment to reflect on this, judging is not on trial here. We judge all the time. To say, “Do not judge”, is almost like saying, “Do not breathe”. It is inevitable that we adjudicate as long as we are breathing. If you were late, you would need to ascertain whether it was safe or not before you dash across Jalan Gasing in order to catch the first reading. At the petrol station, whilst filling up your tank, you decide if one of your car’s tyres has enough air. In the kitchen you check that your roast in the oven is already brown. And the appraising, evaluating and concluding goes on.

We automatically use our judgement because it is a faculty necessary for life to function. That being the case, then how we judge and the criteria we use to judge are on trial. Hence, “Do not be judgemental” refers to how and by what criteria we have arrived at our judgements.

How are we to use our faculty of judgement? In particular, how do we deal with the reality of sinners and sins?

Firstly, the Gospel provides a useful glimpse of how the early Church was guided by Her Lord in dealing with the reality of imperfection. The Pharisees believed in a kingdom meant for saints. In such a utopian ideal, sinners were supposed to be weeded out. But, in telling the parable of the wheat and weed, it became clear that up and until the time of judgement, the Church—the Kingdom in pilgrimage—would be made up of both saints and sinners. The Church should be big enough to embrace sinners.

Secondly, how we are to judge is helped by how Christ personally dealt with sinners. Remember the scene in John’s Gospel with Christ, the woman caught in adultery and the very “righteous” crowd. The crowd was insistent that the law should be applied because it was a clear-cut case—anyone caught in adultery should be stoned to death. Christ did not prohibit judging when He applied the rule that the sinless be the first to cast the stone. It was not a case of “Don’t be judgemental”. Instead, He proceeded to separate the sinner from the sin. He forgave her whilst commanding her to sin no more. When we say that God’s mercy is just, we mean that His mercy extends to the sinner whilst His judgement is against the sin. [1]

The distinction between the sinner and sin is crucial to how we are to judge. Without separating the two, what follows would be the attempt to weed out the sinner and not just the sin. We would like to think that we have progressed culturally, economically, politically and socially but the fact remains that many of us are unable to make this distinction. An example would be the recent beatification of John Paul II, when the enlightened and civilised world was aghast at the presence of Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe. How could the Holy See allow this man, considered to be evil, to be present? It would seem that the Church has condoned the evil that Mugabe had committed. [2] Enlightened though we may be, things have not changed since the time of our Lord. The Scribes and the Pharisees were aghast at how Jesus could mingle with tax-collectors, prostitutes and sinners.

In the light of a momentous event to come this Monday; a meeting with implications for the Church in Malaysia, we need to make a distinction between the sinner and his sins because God’s grace works in mysterious ways. By saying that God’s grace is mysterious, it is not absolving the sinner of his responsibilities. Instead, it affirms that God’s mercy cannot be constrained by our limited sense of justice. But, if you think further, our inability or refusal to make this distinction actually points to our systematic despair. [3] We do not believe enough in God’s grace. We dare not trust God. When we fear to trust God, then we would need to forge a better world. In fact, we would need to force the world to conform to our image and likeness. [4] So, in our failure to belief, we begin to demand a world that is “either or”, forgetting that the world of grace is “both and”. Therefore, we want a Church which is made of either saints or not at all, forgetting that the Church is made up of both saints and sinners. The parable of the yeast reveals how good that can come despite evil. Yeast is a corrupting agent and yet it is able to make the dough rise. So, Christ draws the analogy that even evil can be subverted by God to be a catalyst for the good.

So, what will the headlines of our newspaper be on Tuesday? Will we be horrified, scandalised, and disgusted by front-page picture which will juxtapose what we consider to be good and evil? How will we judge in such a situation? The parable of the wheat and weed comes at an opportune Sunday to remind us, not so much as, not to judge but to make a distinction between the sinner and his sins and also to reassure us that what may seem like evil subverting the good for its own advancement may also be in the light of grace, God subverting evil in order to further His kingdom. For God’s mysterious grace to work, we need to trust Him and we need so much more prayers.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Instead of focusing on the issue of sin, often we end up criticising the sinner. Therefore, it is not the fact that one has sinned that is problematic. The “how” is problematic in the sense that one may have point but how that point has been made would determine the “sinner’s” openness to change. A good example is trying to point out the fault of a server but in a moment of anger, the priest might blurt out “You stupid ah”. No lesson is learnt here. Instead, the server might be canonised in his fault to repeat it.
[2] In fact, both the sinner and his sins are fused in a way in which we see no difference between them. Our condemnation of a heinous crime often corresponds to our severe condemnation of the sinner. Thus, the punishment for crime must correspond in exactly an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
[3] It is not helped because our personality-driven world is littered by the failures of our fallen icons. It is close to systematic failure because almost every one of our traditional icons for leadership—religious, political, social and cultural have been found wanting—priests, religious, politicians, industrialists. All have been found to betray our trusts. In a climate where all hopes are dashed, it is no wonder our hearts are hardened and we no longer can see between a sinner and his sins.
[4] A good example of this “force” is found in spousal relationships. When husband and wife dare not trust God, then they will want to force a solution to the problems that they have as a couple. In fact, much of our counselling relates to this lack of trust expressed as both desiring to “make” the relationship better.

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

2011-07-04T13:06:00.001+08:00

The Sunday theme and the Gospel seem to be at opposite ends of a spectrum. The theme, “The Lord is kind and full of compassion”, is taken from the Responsorial Psalm. For those who subscribe to the Gospel of Nice, a theme like this is reassuring. But note that there may be a correlation between the idea of a nice God and our definition of freedom. Lurking near our idea of a God who is kind and compassionate is a corresponding notion that He cannot help but forgive. Not far from the notion of a helpless but forgiving God is a concept of freedom that is almost absolute. [1]

Today’s Gospel passage, however, gives us another picture. We are invited to bear the yoke of Christ. The yoke is to corral and curtail the free movement of draught animals whose function is basically to do what they have been harnessed and trained to do. Thus, the yoke suggests of “slavery”.

So, on the one hand, the Sunday theme proposes a kind of freedom and on the other hand, the Gospel prescribes slavery. How are they related and are they really opposite ends of a spectrum? Is the opposite of freedom slavery? To answer these questions, we need to understand the difference between liberty and licence; between what is possible and what is permissible.

When we think of freedom, we think of liberty. Our working understanding of liberty is basically licence; licence to do what we want. But, liberty is not a licence to do what we want. Consider this: We are at liberty to choose good or evil. This liberty accords with the definition of who we are—created in the image and likeness of God. Whilst we are at liberty to choose good or evil, we have no licence to do evil. Let me rephrase. We have the freedom to choose good or evil but we have no right to do evil and licence seems to suggest that. When we cannot tell the difference between liberty and licence, then our definition of liberty is the licence/right to do anything and everything.

This brings me to my next point which is the difference between what is possible and what is permissible. There is an infinite array of possibilities in all our lives. Science, with its attendant applications, technology, has made life liveable. Through technological progress we have achieved an enviable standard of living and we will continue to improve in the quality of life. With such improvement, we also widen our possibilities. What has also happened is that we have equated possibility with permissibility. The possibility of splitting the atom has been translated into the permissible use of nuclear fission in bombs, for example. This example highlights the difference between what is possible and what is permissible and instinctively we know that they are not the same. Possibility describes our capacity but permissibility prescribes our moral responsibility. In a way, Japan’s Fukushima has brought this distinction to the fore. Europe certainly possesses the technology and yet her citizens are debating the permissibility of building nuclear power stations. [2] There are lines beyond which possibility will not cross even if it can. What is possible for us to do is not always permissible. Therefore, I may have the liberty to terminate a person’s life but I do not have the licence to do so.

Here you begin to realise that the liberty that we have been socialised to believe we ought to have is a kind which is invested solely in the individual, meaning that it is a liberty that is unfettered and absolute. You watch the “Pursuit of Happyness” and you hear the main character Christopher Gardner, played by Will Smith, mouthing the same philosophy: “Hey. Don't ever let somebody tell you... You can't do something. Not even me. All right?” That philosophy seems to permeate every stratum of our society especially young people who are daily fed this fallacy that “nobody can limit them”. Let me clarify, on one level Christopher Gardner was correct but to remain at that level would be to set an individual’s unfettered liberty as the sole criterion for a person’s self-expression. [3]

However, apply that unlimited capacity for self-expression to the act of suicide. A man who jumps off the 21st story of a hotel appears to behave according to the dictate of absolute liberty in the sense that he is in charge of his life. However, place that single act of “individual and unfettered liberty” against the actions of the detectives who need to investigate the circumstances that led to the jumping, the personnel from CSI who need to examine a mangled body, and worse, the poor Indonesian contract workers who have to scrape off body parts, wash the blood off the pavement and scrub clean the wall of the hotel, etc.

There is no such thing as unencumbered liberty. Our liberty is always set in relation to others. Doing what we want is not always an expression of freedom. What is ironical is that the very exercise of “personal” liberty, in many cases, is also an expression of our slavery. The liberty to watch pornography is actually a form of slavery. [4] The same goes for playing computer games endlessly, drinking excessively and gambling thoughtlessly. These are addictions. They enslave.

The opposite of freedom is not slavery as if the presence of one necessitates the absence of the other. You are either free or not free. True freedom is not the absence of slavery. True freedom is only found when we are bound—according to the second reading: “Your interests are not in the unspiritual, but in the spiritual because the Spirit of God has made His home in us”. In the Gospel, Christ tells us that true freedom is to be bound under His yoke. The meaning of being bound under His yoke is spelt out by the Catechism: Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. Our greatest freedom comes not because we are free from slavery to addiction but from being yoked to Christ. Only when we freely accept the yoke of Christ do we come to realise that He is not our “captor” but our liberator. He stands not behind us as a task master but beside us bearing the full weight of our yoke. So, the more we are bound to Him, the more we will know true freedom. In Him, we live, we move and have our greatest freedom.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] When we have a God on our side, we gain greater confidence and thus, freedom. Here, we are not too far from a God who cannot help but forgive…
[2] Maybe we do need to go to Europe. Here in our backyard if only our government understand this difference with respect to the issue of the “rare earth” facility of Lynas.
[3] It is true that no one can limit our dreams but our dreams are circumscribed by the curtains of permissibility.
[4] Recognising the difference between liberty and licence, what is possible and what is permissible may help us understand where the Church is coming from. In the area of contraception, the Church based her teaching on what she considers to be permissible whereas many Catholics reaction would come from what is possible. Clearly we do have the means and yet we are not permitted.

Corpus Christi Year A

2011-06-26T23:47:00.000+08:00

Today is 1st Holy Communion for our children. To understand what they are doing and what they are receiving we need to need to know what had happened before the Gospel passage we have heard and what happened after. The Gospel is taken from John 6. Here, we hear Christ making the connexion between eating His flesh, drinking His blood and eternal life. “My flesh is real food. My blood is real drink. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life”.

What happened before the Gospel passage we just heard was that Christ had fed 5000 men, not to mention women and children. After they had eaten, they wanted more food. But Jesus had already left for Capernaum crossing the Lake Tiberias. The people followed after Jesus but they were not looking for Him. They were searching for the easy source of food and Jesus got into a conversation with them. When Jesus told them that the food for eternal was His flesh and His blood, they were disgusted by the suggestion of “cannibalism”. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat”?

But Jesus was insistent, “If you want to have eternal life, the only way you are going to get it is to eat my flesh and drink my blood”. This was where everything started to unravel. Many disciples left Him and stopped going with Him. The reaction of Jesus to their departure is important for us because Jesus did not run after them to correct them. He did not say, “I am sorry, I did not mean that”. Instead to confirm what He really meant, He turned to Peter: “What about you? You want to leave as well?” We know the answer: The Apostles stayed with Jesus.

What is significant is that Jesus in today’s Gospel did not say, “Eat my body”. That would be easy because we can metaphorically or figuratively explain that “Eat my body” has a less “yucky” feel to it. For example, “I could eat a horse” does not mean I want to eat a horse. It just means that I want to eat a lot. It is a figure of speech. Thus, in the context of the Gospel, for John to use the word “flesh” is to show the seriousness of Jesus’ claim. [1]

In fact, the word “eat” sounds sterile. The word closer to the original Greek is to chew or to masticate. To have eternal life we must chew, gnaw or masticate His flesh and drink His blood. If that be the case, Jesus would be lying to all of us if He did not keep His promise. To keep His promise, He must give us His Flesh and Blood to eat and drink. And the only way that He can keep His promise is that something must change in the Eucharist.

Let me explain this change through this power-point presentation.

Explaining transubstantiation

It is either Jesus or it is not. If it is not, then I have wasted my entire life. Yours too. But if it is, then your behaviour and mine must change because it is Jesus and no less. What we receive is the True Presence, not false. What we receive is really Jesus, not a symbol. What we receive is substantially the same Jesus who walked 2000 years ago.

If it is truly, really and substantially Jesus, then, He is to be adored under the appearance of bread. When we receive Holy Communion the hand, we make sure that no crumbs are left on the palm of our hand or on our fingers. Now you know why I have stopped blessing children. It does not make sense to rub particles of the sacred species onto the children’s foreheads. So, those of you who are weak and elderly and also unsure in your steps, you may want to consider receiving Holy Communion on the tongue to avoid accident with the sacred species. The other day I gave communion in two species and there was spillage. When that happens, theoretically, the place where the consecrated host lands or the consecrated wine is spilt has to be purified. But, we organise our lives according to convenience and also for many of us, the Blessed Sacrament is at best an exalted symbol, to “waste time” purifying does not really make sense. Why? Because we do not appreciate the Blessed Sacrament as it really is.

If we do appreciate it, then, outside of the celebration of Mass, we genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle when we cross the nave of the Church. When the Blessed Sacrament is carried in procession and it passes you, you kneel because your God is passing before you. The Solemnity of Corpus Christi is not complete without the procession. We carry Jesus our Lord around in a procession stopping at four different places that represent the four corners of the world. We, who believe that what we are receiving is truly, really and substantially Jesus, we, bring Him to the world. In this procession, we pray that the Body of Christ will make us more and more into the Body of Christ—the more we eat of Him, the more we shall become like Him.

This is our Jubilee Year. We desire it to be a holy year. We also desire to be holy personally. But, sometimes we approach this desire in a wrong way because holiness is truly a fruit of a deepened appreciation of the Eucharist and the True Presence therein. There more we grow in Eucharistic love, the more we yearn for holiness. Otherwise, we will be running around trying to do more thinking that the more we do the holy we are.

The troubles we have as Church may be traced to this problem: priest and people have treated the Blessed Sacrament as a symbol. Yes, we treat it as a very special symbol but still, it is a symbol and no more. I do not want to be a priest who celebrates a symbol. I want to be a priest who celebrates a change that is real, true and substantial. If the Church is serious about her mission in the world, then she needs to return to the knowledge and deepened appreciation of what the Blessed Sacrament is: truly, really and substantially Jesus Christ our Lord.

FOOTNOTE:
[1] As far as we are concerned “Eat my Body” and “Eat my Flesh” are the same. The former is neither a figure of speech nor metaphorical. Just that “Eat my Body” sounds less threatening. The intent, however, is the same as “Eat my Flesh”.

Trinity Sunday Year A

2011-06-20T01:25:00.001+08:00

From someone rarely spoken of, or, someone left out in ordinary Christian conversation, we move onto a subject not easy to understand. Last week, the so-called “person rarely spoken of” was the Holy Spirit. This Sunday, the subject not easy to understand is the Trinity. The Trinity is really difficult God-talk. [1] Against the backdrop of Judaism and Islam, a backdrop of strict monotheism, how is it that we claim to believe in one God? How is it that three persons in one God do not equate to three Gods?

In the first place, the dogma of the Holy Trinity is not a product of pure human reasoning but a result of reason’s collaboration with divine revelation. We can never come to know the God who is one in three, without God first revealing Himself to us. The source of God’s revelation is sacred scriptures, both the Old and the New Testaments. This revelation means that Sacred Tradition with the help of reason has this task of elucidating this mystery whilst at the same time recognising its own limits. Today, I am not going to answer the “how” of “How three persons can be one God?” but to explore “how” the approaches we take of our discussions of God have implications.

There are basically two ways of approaching a discussion on the Trinity—Trinitatis ad intra and Trinitatis ad extra. Trinitatis ad intra refers to the immanent or the ontological Trinity. It is to speak of God’s nature or God as He really is and it pertains to the inner or interior life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Trinitatis ad extra, on the other hand, refers to the economic Trinity. It speaks of God’s activity in the world and how He functions with reference to creation, redemption and sanctification. It describes how God functions in the Church and the world.

In summary, ontological Trinity explains who God is whereas economic Trinity explains what God does. Which approach is more important? According to Karl Rahner, a German theologian, he says that the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity. So, both approaches are important. However, our problem is that we are no longer at home with the language of the immanent or ontological Trinity. Why? Well, for one, it sounds rather indulgent and it seems to border on “narcissism”. Who cares? Instead, we are more at home with the language of the economic Trinity. It is certainly more relevant. Let me illustrate why we seem to opt for the economic rather than the immanent Trinity. The concept of "person@ in the Trinity is not the same as we understand a person to be. A person in the Trinity describes a relationship. Thus, the Father is Father because He has a Son and vice-versa. Your response might be, “Err… so what?” What has that knowledge to do with us?

As we are more at home with the language of the economy, it is easier to speak of the Trinity in terms of functions. For example, God the Father creates, God the Son redeems and God the Holy Spirit sanctifies. [2] As you can see, it is far easier to understand God in relation to us because ours is a culture basically characterised by “work”, “doing” or “achievement”. We live this self-actualising or self-driven philosophy which cuts across everything that we do.

The result of losing this sense of “being” or ontology is we begin to think of being in terms of doing. In fact, we have become more “doing”, more “functional” and much more “utilitarian”. By definition then, a thing is because of what it does.

The loss of this sense of “being” has grave implications. A good analogy to give you an idea about this loss is the difference between “vocation” and “career”. Vocation has taken on a more restrictive connotation. When we speak of vocation, we think of priestly or religious vocation. But vocation is a calling “to be”, more than it is a calling “to do”. The vocation “to be” is no longer fashionable because we seemed to have defined ourselves by what we do rather than we take our cue from who we are. When a priest is measured by his “function”, you can be sure that not far from this mentality is the call to “ordain” women because anyone can carve out a career as a “priest”. Anyone can do a priest’s job.

When we forget “being”, the result is that we will esteem or honour the self-made man. Put it in another way, “What are you if you are not your work?” Even though this sounds a little calculative but that is basically how we measure worth. Can you hear the distant echo of euthanasia?

In a way we are not so different from ages before us. In ancient times, the Tower of Babel was a good example of this “self-actualising” philosophy. Today, our “self-actualisation” tends to equate our technological prowess or capability with “progress”. In science and technology, we have progressed in leaps and bounds. As a consequence, we unconsciously and mechanically translate this progress into the “spiritual” realm. As we believe that we can economically shape ourselves, we can also “spiritually” forge ourselves. In fact, the Tower of Babel stands as a testament to humanity’s belief that it can stand head and shoulder with God and say, “Here is a world better than what you have given us”. I believe that many of us have this idea that Confession is useless because we continue sinning. Behind this despair is this idea: “Why can’t I be more perfect so that God can be worthy of me”? When we forget being, we begin to define ourselves by “doing”. And when we “do”, we will come to believe we can make ourselves worthy of God.

The forgetfulness of “being” means that the Blessed Trinity has to work very hard to convince us. In fact, He has to work many miracles in order to be a step ahead of humanity. [3] The implication of forgetting the garden of ontology is that we will be cursed to wander the wasteland of utility trying to measure ourselves by our achievements. Trinity Sunday is an invitation to reflect on God’s being in Himself, a seemingly useless exercise but existentially important to us. Knowing who God is means that we will allow God to work in our lives.

Finally, what we do does not define who we are but rather who we are defines what we do. Who are we? We are not self-made man or self-made woman. But, we are made in the image and likeness of God. Not knowing ourselves, we will be driven to innovate, renovate and recreate. Thus, to discover Man, we have to discover God. To discover Man, we need to return to the garden of “being” or ontology to reflect on who God is and not only what God does.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is perhaps a tad easier to understand the “make-up” of Christ. Who is He? He is the 2nd Person of the Trinity. What is He? He is both divine and human. Thus, Christ is one person, a divine person, with two natures, both divine and human. Furthermore, the consubstantiality between the Father and Son was officially confirmed at the Council of Nicea in AD325, while the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and Son was officially established at the Council of Constantinople in AD381.
[2] The truth is opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt. It means that the works of the Trinity outside are indivisible. It means that one cannot really say that the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by how they act in the world. The only way to distinguish the three persons is through their relationships. The Father is the source of the Son and the Spirit. The Son is begotten of the Father. And the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
[3] How many of you do “take-aways”? Have you ever thought of the styrofoam containers we use to pack our take-aways? They come directly from the factory straight to our hawkers and what if with food, we also ingest styrofoam “dust”? Some of the chemicals we ingest are cumulative in our bodies and when cancer strikes, we cry “Why God?” without thinking that we contribute to our self-poisoning. Instead, poor God has to work so many more “miracles” because we are just too dumb or selfish.

Pentecost Year A

2011-06-12T15:40:00.000+08:00

What do we understand of Pentecost and what is its significance?

Its significance might not be that obvious considering that we are easily seduced by the spectacular. And what is more spectacular than the tongues of flames coming to rest on the Apostles. Our understanding of Pentecost is that the Spirit goes wherever He wants to. That is the impression we get because Vatican II has often been described as a breath of fresh air set against what was perceived as the rigidity of the pre-Vatican era. This sense of the Spirit being able to work without and beyond “confines” and “limitations”, appeals to our idea of freedom, which is commonly accepted as being able to do anything, anywhere and at anytime.

But, what if I propose to you that Pentecost is also as sober as the Sacrament we are celebrating today? It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we are able to confect the bread into the Body of Christ. On the mountain Christ promised to be with His Church until the end of time. Thus, the Spirit is that promise kept which means the Spirit is “tied” to the Church. This being “tied” to the Church reveals a kind of “responsibility” quite antithetical/contrary to our concept of unlimited freedom. Through our ritual celebrations, the Holy Spirit guarantees that the liturgical actions of the Church are truly the actions of Christ Himself.

Christ on earth, through His Prophetic, Priestly and Kingly actions, exercised the authority of God the Father. He revealed Himself as the Truth, offered Himself as the Lamb who took away our sins and He conquered Death by taking away its eternal hold over us. He then sent His disciples out with the same authority He has received from His Father: “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”. This sending is through the Holy Spirit. This sending is empowering and therefore exciting. It gives us a sense of purpose. Granted that the world is so wrong, we yearn for the Spirit’s strength to change the world and to, cliché as it may sound, make the world a better place.

But, at the heart of this sending we encounter a contemplative spirit, Mary, who reveals to us the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church. She was there at Pentecost and it would not be heretical to say that she was not totally surprised by all that was taking place. Why? She herself had been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at the moment of the Annunciation. Pentecost was to be another overshadowing. Thus, she who had given birth to the Body of Christ incarnate would now give birth to the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. Thus, the Mother of Christ is also the Mother of the Church.

By the action of the Holy Spirit, Christ was incarnated through her and once again by the action of the Holy Spirit, the Church is incarnated through her. The birth of the Church took place in the Upper Room. Up there we note a distinct connexion between the Holy Spirit and Apostolic Authority. We hear this in the Gospel today: Those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain, they are retained. At Pentecost, what was visible in Christ has now passed into the Sacraments.

Your browser may not support display of this image. We can safely say that the heart of Pentecost beats with a Marian rhythm. Take a look at this icon of Christ’s Ascension. In the Orthodox tradition, Ascension and Pentecost are coalesced into one, and in its iconography, the Holy Spirit is not depicted because by His very nature the Holy Spirit is invisible. What you see is Christ is portrayed as enthroned in glory surrounded by the angels who are sending the Apostles out on missions. At the heart of the different missions stands the figure of Mary with her hands in the “orans” position. She prays for the Church.

If Pentecost is the beginning of the Church, then right at the beginning stands the model of one who is forever faithful: Mary. Even as we break into joyful noise, there is a stillness which commands us to pray. In an age which prizes “happening” and which celebrates a “can-do” spirit, we are led by Mary to a deeper appreciation of the relationship between prayer and the Church.

In summary, the significance of Pentecost is that we do not of ourselves make the Church and neither can we grant ourselves salvation. The contemplative spirit of Pentecost has Mary praying for the Church that through the Spirit, we become Church. Make us one body and one Spirit in Christ; a prayer echoed in all the Eucharistic Prayers and this one taken from EPIII. It is true that we cannot help but be overawed by the 3000 added to their number. And, just when we think that Pentecost primes us into action, Mary leads us back to prayer. Pentecost celebrates what the Spirit, through prayer, can do for us.

But, if this sounds lame, let me tell you it does because we breathe the air of self-help. Go to any bookshop and you will find a big section entitled: “Self-help”. We have come to believe more in our own strength than the strength of the Holy Spirit. However, if you desire to change the world, this desire must be founded on prayers rather than our capability because the Holy Spirit can do infinitely more than all our machinations can ever achieve. Let us pray: “Come Holy Spirit”.

7th Sunday of Easter Year A

2011-06-05T23:24:00.000+08:00

This Sunday, some parts of the Catholic world are celebrating both Ascension and World Communications Sunday. For us, the 7th Sunday does feel like a straggling Sunday searching for a purpose. Perhaps, Communications Sunday is significant enough as it straddles two great events, Ascension and Pentecost, nourished as it were by the fertile soil of the first novena. Take note that 9 days after the Ascension, the Holy Spirit will descend upon the Apostles. Those 9 days marked the ancient Church’s first novena. What has communications to do with Pentecost? In recent weeks, Christ has been speaking of the coming Spirit as the Spirit of Truth. So, the Spirit who testifies to the Truth testifies to Christ. That is the link that makes Communications Sunday relevant: Communication is of the Truth.

That, in a nutshell, defines the essence of communication.

But, as usual, we are a forgetful people. [1] We seem to have forgotten the primary aim of communication.

For some of us, communication is basically a measure of its medium. Let me explain. We have heard it said that the “medium is the message” and in a sense this is true because we are engrossed or captivated by the technologies of our communication. Remember those heady days when a gangster or a nouveau riche would sit in a hawker’s place publicly parading the precursor of the present mobile phones, an act symbolising that he has arrived. Today, our preoccupation is to reduce the size of our communication devices. Have you watched Star Trek? We look forward to the day when a touch of the badge would be enough to let us communicate. As you can see, we have always been fascinated with how we can communicate better. But, we are by no means unique.

Let me tell a little about the Mediæval Ages. Do not be fooled by what historians term as the Dark Ages. Despite its name, it gave birth to the university system. In those “Dark” times, it seemed that theologians were speculating as to how many angels can dance on top of a pinhead. [2]

We are no different. We somehow equate “more” with “better” as evidenced by our preoccupation with the number of terabytes we can compress onto our solid-state drive. We started with kilobytes, to mega, to giga and now terabytes. [I am sure there must be some bytes I know not of]. We continually chase a faster speed for our computer processors. We are obsessed with effective methods of communication and you would be surprised that this obsession with speed and space is fuelled no less by an industry our taboo-ridden culture is too shy to acknowledge. According to an American social critic, “Great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography”. [3] Pornography, in large proportion, has determined the speed of our communicative technologies.

Between the aim of communication and its means, we will always be side-tracked by media’s ability to promise us instant gratification. You are having steam-boat in Cameron Highlands and immediately your circle of Facebook friends can see you savouring the fish-balls or blanching the fresh pickings of vegetables direct from the ambient farms. The immediacy we want of our experiences expresses what the Holy Father in his message says: entering cyberspace can be a sign of authentic search for personal encounters with others. The impetus for immediacy draws attention to our desires to encounter and to be encountered, to know and to be known, to accept and to be accepted and finally to love and to be loved. Sadly, we also know that the effects of immediacy often do not lead to genuine encounter. The many means often do not facilitate the aim.

Communications Sunday reminds us that nothing is more personal than an encounter with Christ Himself. In fact, the Gospel today, a preface to Pentecost next week, speaks of the hour when the Father will glorify the Son and the Son will glorify the Father by giving eternal life to those entrusted to Him. What is eternal life? To know the one, true God and Jesus Christ Whom the Father has sent. All throughout her history, the Church stands as that beacon emitting and transmitting this message of eternal salvation inviting all men and women to this personal encounter with Christ the Saviour of the world. All media of communication must be harnessed for this purpose.

Let me bring in last week’s second reading which comes from the 2nd Letter of St Peter. He provides us with the motivation as to why Christians ought to embrace the technologies available. He says: “Always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have”. The different media of communication, apart from merely communicating and bringing us together, serves this one purpose—that we always be ready to give the reason for our hope in Christ.

In conclusion, in our search to connect with one another through the different media of communication, let us not forget that their sole aim is to convey the truth. Truth is not baring it all; it is not naked truth and certainly not the same as “Wikileaks”. Instead, truth is the person of Jesus Christ Who is our very life and He is our mission in the world. These 9 days we pray because we need the strength of the Holy Spirit to continue to emit and to transmit the message of the eternal salvation of Jesus Christ, the Lord.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Now you know why the Mass is also referred to as a memorial; a memorial that is more than merely remembering.
[2] A trite question which effectively dismisses the contributions of the Schoolmen to the advancement of Western civilisation.
[3] Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae.

Ascension Thursday Year A

2011-06-02T23:22:00.000+08:00

I am happy that Ascension is still celebrated on a Thursday and not on a Sunday. After all, it is not called Ascension Thursday for nothing. Later, you will know why I am happy. The first reading took off as the Gospel concluded, giving us a picturesque description of the post-Ascension scene. On a mountain, we are told, that as the Lord was lifted up, they looked on until a cloud took Him from their sight. Even then, they continued staring into the sky.

Was their sight blocked by the clouds of mystery or interrupted by the appearance of two men in white as reported by Luke or was there something else they saw? They were transfixed for they saw heaven and no less. Mt 6:21 or Lk 12:34 tell us this: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. So, in the case of the Ascension, where Christ the head has gone to, you can be sure that the Church His Body is there also. On the mountain, the Apostles were momentarily transported into heaven. Hence, the Ascension was not simply the act of Christ returning to from whence He had come. In the Ascension we actually catch a glimpse of heaven, much like Peter, James and John lingering on Mount Tabor after they caught sight of Christ brilliance at the Transfiguration.

This glimpse of heaven succinctly sketched in the second reading is echoed in our liturgy for the Ascension: Christ, the mediator between God and man, judge of the world and Lord of all, has passed beyond our sight, not to abandon us but to be our hope. Christ is the beginning, the head of the Church; where He has gone, we hope to follow.

But, unlike the Apostles, we are not completely convinced that we should follow. Our line of vision is blocked not by the clouds of mystery or by angels appearing. Instead, our vision is blurred because we have mistaken earth for heaven. What was originally intended to be a pit-stop has become for us the final destination. We have been so beguiled by the world that we no longer give a second thought to heaven and what is disturbing is for most of us that is not unusual. In the field of socio-politico-economic planning, we speak of strategic long-term planning but our long-term is not long enough.

Have you watched the movie 2012? Notice how a symbol of life hereafter, the Dome of St Peter’s Basilica was dramatically destroyed as it ploughed into a Piazza packed with praying pilgrims, sending a clear message that belief in the afterlife was basically futile. Furthermore, observe how the crack on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel occurred right at the spot where God the Father’s finger touches Adam’s and giving him life. The crack effectively severed the link between the Creator and the creature, rendering the promise of everlasting presence that Christ made on the mountain null and void. Thus, we are reduced to a materialist existence. Our obsession with the prolongation not the preservation of life is symptomatic of a materialist [1] philosophy.

This obsession with prolonging life is manifested through a preoccupation we have with safety. In the aftermath of the recent landslide we are naturally caught up by the mindless and unnecessary loss of lives. Our discussions centre on, amongst many issues, the need for proper building codes or regulations—where and how to build. If you see a construction site, you would probably know what I am speaking about. There would be numerous signs reminding workers about safety together with the necessary barricades, harnesses and helmets. And of course, these are needed to indemnify the builders or contractors should any mishaps occur on-site.

This preoccupation with precaution which is symptomatic of a materialist world cuts across every facet of our live. For example, parents with a single offspring will take every precaution for their child to be safe. And let me clarify that I am not against the taking of precaution. Taking proper steps to be safe is commendable because it is the expression of the instinct to preserve life.

But, do you know that many of us worry about safety but we do not give ample thoughts to salvation? It seems that we want to be safe but we do not really care that we be saved. This is what I meant when I said that we have mistaken a pit-stop for the final destination. Our concern for safety is actually an expression of our desire for salvation but we are beguiled into thinking that safety is the be all and end all of our concerns. Even if we do not say it, we are actually implying that beyond safety, there is only a void—nothingness. Preservation of life is one thing. Obsessive prolongation of life is just an indication of a materialist mentality.

Now you know why I am happy that Ascension is celebrated today. It is a little inconvenient. You would have to set aside time, rush from work, break your daily routine. What the exercise does is that it takes us away from all that we deem to be important materially so that we can catch a glimpse of what is also important immaterially—heaven.

If Ascension is a reminder of our salvation, a reminder that our home is in heaven, then it is also a reminder of what God does for us. Moving it to a Sunday merely proposes that salvation can “wait” and we are “masters” of our destiny and salvation, so much so that we can leave God to a time when we have the time to attend to Him. It is convenience at its worst. So, despite its materialist overtone, the movie 2012 teaches us a valuable lesson: the time for salvation waits for no one. Do not be caught unawares. As Shakespeare quotes of Julius Caesar, set honour in one eye and death in the other, Ascension invites us live life to the fullest but always with one eye set on heaven.

FOOTNOTE:
[1] I have deliberately not used the word “materialistic” because I am simply making an observation rather than a “judgement”. We are materialist by nature because we are incarnated spirits. The word does not in any way denigrate worldly concerns. However, rich or poor, everyone’s struggle is to be non materialistic.

5th Sunday of Easter Year A

2011-05-22T23:15:00.000+08:00

This Sunday our Lord seems to be rubbish talking—something we are familiar with. Amongst the Chinese, when a person begins to talk about his or her death, the usual response is “Don’t talk rubbish”. But, the context of Christ’s speech is just before the Passion and so it is more than just morbid chatter. There are always implications for being a Christian—his faith will be tested and he will be rejected by the world. In any test of faith, people do get lost especially when things go drastically wrong. Today, Christ tells His disciples not to lose hope or be discouraged but instead to know that in Him, they can be sure of salvation because He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. There is no mistaking the absolute claim in what the Lord says. He is not just any way to follow. He is not simply a truth amongst many to believe in. Instead, He is the only source of salvation and as the 2nd Reading asserts: He is the precious cornerstone.

The absolute claim of Christ also makes this Sunday almost a sin to some people for whom the only Gospel they subscribe to is called the “Gospel” of Relativism. Furthermore, there are not a few schooled in the Philosophy of Sincerity—meaning that it is enough that one lives sincerely [1]—who might consider this declaration to be really arrogant. An absolute claim is a scandal of exclusivity. In an inclusive world, how dare we impose our standard on others?

In light of an inclusive convention that upholds tolerance, the question of how we dare to impose on others seems like a fair enough question to ask but what remains to be asked is if Christ’s absolute claim were inconsistent with who we are as human being? Here, we detect a certain inconsistency in the way our inclusive world is organised. On the one hand, we have come to accept tolerance [meaning acceptance and no judgement] as the most appropriate manner of human interaction. On the other hand, we categorically exclude certain actions from the same canon of tolerance. At best, what we have is an irregular form of tolerance which actually speaks volumes of our inconsistency and which is also part of the difficulty we find ourselves in. Either we arbitrarily choose certain standards to apply which is nothing but caprice, random, anarchy or, we instinctively recognise certain limits we need to adhere too. By the very fact that we seem to exclude certain behaviours from the canon/rule of [tolerance] acceptability—sexual harassment and child abuse are two good examples—that means we implicitly accept certain standards. If we can hold to such moral standards, then there is truth to be known.

But, the reality is we are afraid or we cowed by the political correctness of tolerance to hold no more than personal opinions as the standard for engagement. If one should step beyond the boundaries of personal opinion, “selective” tolerance will consider that to be oppressive. A good example is Christ’s claim which Christians accept to be an absolute that is applicable to everyone. And that is irony of tolerance. Tolerance is not so tolerant after all.

The implication of accepting truth to be no more than mere opinion would be a descent into some form of oppressive “isms”, not just relativism or subjectivism. Pope Benedict says something to this effect that to dismiss truth as unattainable is destructive. When we are incapable of truth, it follows that we are also incapable of ethical values because there would be no standard to measure. Convenience or contingency are measures of our lack of standard as we are often reduced to the lowest common denominator. For example, when human life is no longer a measure of the sacred, then euthanasia is not far off. When we are held together by the lowest common denominator, then, it is power, meaning who holds more power rules as in the case of dictatorship or it is simply the majority who rules as in the case of so-called democracy. Marxism, Nazism and Racism, to name a few, are children of the tyranny of dictatorship or the mob of the majority.

More than ever, today, Christianity must propose the Truth as applicable to everyone because mankind is capable of truth. We are capable of knowing what truth is or better still knowing Who Truth is—Jesus Christ. In this world, scarred by the abuse of power, either by the few or the majority, the manner of our proposal is defined to be the person of Jesus Christ. As Christ stood before Pilate, when faced with the Truth, Pilate continued to pose the question: Veritas, quid est veritas? It was as if Pilate expected “truth” to be expressed through coercion or might. But, Truth who is Christ is revealed in peace and proposed through persuasion not power and conviction, not coercion. This is where we come in. Truth is the Person of Jesus Christ and the Church’s sole duty is to proclaim Him and His mission—Son of God and Saviour of the World. The power of Truth lies not in legions but in the witness of our lives to convince others of who He is: Our Lord and Saviour.

Finally, rejection is not something new to Christianity. Relativism may be tyrannical but it is no more than an expression of “rejection”. And not only that, for Christianity is also rejected by a “tolerant” world for making an absolute claim of salvation. Therefore, Christians must always expect “misunderstanding”. The Protestant pastors in Penang may have prayed in this manner: “Lord, let your reign come upon this country”, the way we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. It was not about taking over the country. The negative reaction was an expression of rejection as part and parcel of Christianity. Therefore faith has to be tested but Christians must hold on to faith in Christ because He is the only Way [2], the Truth and the Life.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Good intention is not really a sufficient barometer of truth. For example, I can sincerely kill someone. Our predicament is when we are unable to approximate truth, we have to settle for “goodwill or sincerity”. Is it any wonder why in terms of religions, we are now reduced to seeking ways to collaborate in the many so-called “ethical” endeavours? It is ironical that we cannot know “truth” and yet we somehow “know” that there are “good things” to be done.
[2] We all have this instinctive GPS device that is part of who we are and yet it is a device that does not impede our freedom. How many of you use a GPS device? I have mine tuned to an Englishman who sounds nothing like an Englishman. Often enough I would not take the route proposed and when I deviate from it, “Daniel” would get into this irritating mode “recalculating”. The way put forward by Jesus is not a vacuum. He is the way. We can choose to ignore Him or choose to follow Him. That is where the analogy between Christ’s way and the GPS ends. Christ’s way is not an alternative way. Christ is not just one of the ways. He is the Way and if at all we choose to stick with the irritating voice of “Daniel”, it is this: the voice is our conscience telling us to return to the Way, return to Christ. As the 2nd Reading so right says: set yourselves close to him so that you too, the holy priesthood that offers the spiritual sacrifices which Jesus Christ has made acceptable to God, may be living stones making a spiritual house. A house and a home are two different things. Perhaps our journey in life is to come to a realisation that no matter how comfortable this world may be, it is still a house. We instinctively long for our home for that is where we belong and home is not located in this world. Home is not where the heart is either. Home is where Christ is.

4th Sunday of Easter Year A

2011-05-16T12:11:00.000+08:00

It’s a thematic Sunday again—Vocation Sunday—time to speak about priestly or religious vocations. Coincidentally, yesterday 14th May was also the Feast St Matthias, Apostle. I would like to speak on two topics. Firstly, the manner of Matthias’ election may shed light on why the Catholic priesthood is the way it is today and secondly, the Gospel presents us with an image of the priesthood we do not fully appreciate.

Recently a bishop in Australia was removed. The issues surrounding his removal centred on the bishop’s position that the time has come for women’s ordination, ordination of married priests and on recognising the validity of Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church orders.

Why is the Church so insistent that women cannot be ordained, never mind married priest or recognising the validity of Protestant “orders”? Listen to a passage from the Acts of the Apostles concerning Matthias’ election and you might just catch a glimpse of where the Church is coming from.

“One day Peter stood up to speak to the brothers—there were about a hundred and twenty persons in the congregation: Brothers, the passage of scripture has to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit, speaking through David, foretells the fate of Judas”.

The passage has two considerations. First consideration is the context and second is Peter’s speech. The context is important. After the Ascension, Peter and the 10 returned to Jerusalem and there, they were together with the women and Mary the Mother of Jesus. When the time came for choosing a replacement for Judas, Peter, disregarding the context, spoke in this manner. “Andres, adelphoi ” which is translated as “Men, brothers”.

This is sometimes lost in politically-correct translations. “Friends”, for example, is a vast difference from “Men, brothers”. The literal translation gives us a glimpse into the mind of Christ. Peter seemed to have understood what Christ had intended and here, he faithfully echoed it. It does sound brazen to propose that Peter knew the mind of Christ, but, this is basically the Church’s position as evidenced by how Matthias was chosen. One may not agree with the Church’s position on women’s ordination but one can appreciate why the Church has been unable to move forward in this matter despite the fact that cultural, economical, political or social sentiments have made tremendous progress. Priestly vocation is not tied to any other considerations except what Christ has intended for His Church.

This is not an apologia for the Church’s position as much as offering a plausible explanation of why the Church behaves in this manner. She is being loyal to her Master’s intention for His Church. It also reflects the unity of Christology and Ecclesiology. How we understand Christ defines the Church and logically speaking, Christ the Head cannot be separated from the Church, His Body.

Poor Christology has implications for Ecclesiology. With regard to “priestly” vocations, the paucity of vocation is an infallible indicator of a Bishop’s heterodoxy meaning when a Bishop is not faithful to Church teaching, you can be sure that vocation to the priesthood in his diocese will drop. From there, it does not take long to find a correlation between the lack of priestly vocations and the abundance of the so-called “pastoral associates”. In many contexts, it usually revolves around nuns/lay people trying to play priest.

An increasing reliance on pastoral associates may help explain the lack of priestly vocation. Priestly vocation, like marital vocation, is a vocation to be and not really a vocation to do. When a priest is reduced to his function meaning that he is priest because of what he does, then we descend a slippery slope. The lack of priests can be pragmatically solved by “anyone can do the job”. It does not matter who—nuns, lay men or women, or any Protestant pastor—as long as the “job” gets done. But, a priest’s usefulness does not lie in his utility. Instead, his usefulness is very much to be alter Christus. Even if a priest does nothing, he is Christ present amongst his people. This is important.

This is a sense of priesthood that we have lost and this loss is two sides of a coin. Firstly, we have romanticised the image of the shepherd. Secondly, priests have forgotten that priesthood is about holiness.

Firstly, Catholics have romanticised the idea of the shepherd which runs counter to the two images presented in the Gospel. The shepherd is anything but “tender” and “compassionate”. If you look at the images of the Pharaohs they are presented as shepherds wielding on one hand, a shepherd’s crook and on the other, a whip. The idea of a shepherd is monarchical. In fact the king is often spoken of as a shepherd. In this context, listening becomes obedience. But, since we breathe the air of consensus and democracy, listening becomes a problem as many of us will obey only when the shepherd is reasonable. But, mostly, we listen and obey because we like the shepherd. In the end, the scenario is not the sheep who listens to the shepherd but the contrary. He is no longer the shepherd who commands but rather a hireling. Like some Protestant pastors who can be fired by their congregation. The shepherd says only what the congregation wants to hear.

A couple of weeks ago, I said, “It is easier to love the Pope”. It is not an attack of the Bishop. It merely reflects a reality. The Pope is far away but the Bishop is near and we “know” him etc. We often speak of doing God’s will but tie this desire to do God’s will with someone we “know” and we realise that “doing God’s will” means doing our own thing and expecting the shepherd to sanctify it. And this leads us to the image of the gate.

In Jerusalem, there is a gate called the Sheep-gate. It is a one-way street where the sheep are led to the slaughter. Shepherds lead their sheep to be sacrificed at the altar of holocaust. In the context of Jesus speaking in the Temple, He who became the victim now leads His people to freedom because this one-way street does not lead to a dead end but rather through the torn veil of the Holy of Holies, He leads His sheep to eternal life. Thus, all shepherds must lead because they are meant to lead. For us, it becomes a question of trusting the shepherd as we enter the gate. And I recognise the universal challenge today is that shepherds cannot be trusted. This brings us to the second side of the coin.

Secondly, priests themselves struggle with the issue of trustworthiness. Trustworthiness does not reside in capability or cleverness. Otherwise, that would mean that Christ can only work if a priest is capable or clever. Instead, trustworthiness is a state of holiness. Catholics instinctively trust a priest because they equate priests not with capability or intelligence but with holiness. A holy priest reflects Christ’s holiness. The Patron Saint for diocesan priests is St John Vianney—not someone famed for his cleverness but sought after from all over France for his holiness. This is the reason we pray so much for the Holy Father and the Bishops, for the fullness of priesthood resides in them and also their helpers, the priests. In an age of untrustworthiness, we ask God to give us more holy bishops and priests who will allow Christ to be more real through them. And we pray that they have the courage to lead because they are shepherds placed by Christ over His sheep.

3rd Sunday of Easter Year A

2011-05-08T22:42:00.000+08:00

This Sunday I would like to speak on three interconnected topics. The first topic is pride but not of the sinful kind. By pride, I mean a sense of self-confidence and not, colloquially speaking, of the ‘action’ sort. Second topic revolves around the promise of Christ to be present to us and final topic centres on the Eucharist as the fulfilment of a promise.

Firstly, the gospel today is one which should give Catholics a sense of pride. Sadly, the contrary may be true. Many of us acknowledge our ignorance, meaning, we accept what we have often been told by others and sometimes, this charge of ignorance is echoed by some enlightened Catholics themselves that many Catholics do not know the bible. They may be a spectre of truth in such a statement but let us go beyond merely “knowing” the Bible. For example, let us venture beyond just an ability to quote biblical verses.

Catholics should humbly say, “We may not know the Bible the ‘restrictive and narrow’ way we are expected to but we certainly live and celebrate the Bible”. The Catholic Church is even more faithful to sacred scripture than accepted prejudice would allow. For Catholics, the Bible is not just a “book” but it is a part of what we know and accept to be a sacred and living tradition. Only a living tradition can guarantee and safeguard the handing over [paradosis] of God’s word in its entirety [1] which explains why the Eucharistic Prayer I is worded this way: “We offer them [“them” refers to the gifts of bread and wine] for Benedict, our Pope, for Murphy, our Bishop and for all who hold and teach the catholic faith that comes to us from the apostles”.

We live and celebrate sacred scripture and the description of the two disciples’ experience on the way to Emmaus is a perfect expression of how we do it. Their journey is a panorama of what we are doing right now. Simply put, their journey was the narrative (story) form of what we are ritualising. The narrative is a snapshot of the Eucharist. The part where Christ was elucidating the scripture passages about Himself corresponds to our Liturgy of the Word. The Liturgy of the Word, which includes the homily, is Christ speaking to you.

The four verbs where Christ took the bread, said the blessing, broke it and handed it to the disciples correspond to our offertory, the Eucharistic Prayer with the Institution Narrative, the Fractio Panis when the Agnus Dei is sung and finally the giving and receiving of Holy Communion. Now you know why the Mass is also called the “breaking of bread”—the disciples recognised Him at the breaking of bread. It is plausible to say that before the Gospels were written, and even before the 1st Letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians was written, the ritualised celebration of the Eucharist was already taking place and that this story of the two disciples on to Emmaus was a stylised story to convey the message that the Eucharist [breaking of bread] is really Christ’s presence which brings me to the 2nd topic.

Do you remember the last scene at the Mount of Olive in Matthew’s Gospel, before Christ ascended? The Lord gave a command but He also made a promise. The command was to go and baptise all the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And the promise was that He would be with them till the end of time. He has kept His promise through Apostolic Succession. It is perhaps stating the obvious but Apostolic Succession is not apostolic ancestry or nostalgia in the sense that we are trying to trace back the lineage of succession. It is not a static act of looking backward. Rather, it is forward looking because Apostolic Succession provides the possibility for the Eucharist to be celebrated. Apostolic Succession is dynamically alive and in practice at this very moment even as I am speaking to you.

Imagine if all the priests were killed, nobody here would dare walk up to say to the congregation, “Let me celebrate Mass for you”. We instinctively know that a priest’s power to confect the Eucharist is derived from a power which is transmitted by Apostolic Succession through the laying on of hands. Through Apostolic Succession, each time we celebrate the Eucharist, the bread and wine is transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. Transubstantiation is a technical word but it describes the result that when we receive Holy Communion we eat of the same substance Who walked 2000 years ago. It is the same Body but only in different modes. That is why we call the Blessed Sacrament the True Presence and this brings me to my final point.

There is a connexion here between the Two Disciples and the Eucharist which we might miss in this post-Easter celebration. What is it? The Eucharist is a source of strength when we most want to give up. In life, there are always reasons to give up. At a time when we feel most abandoned, Christ is there. Look at the two disciples. In Luke’s theological perspective, Christ was always heading towards Jerusalem—the city symbolised God’s plan of salvation. We are told that He resolutely set his face for Jerusalem. The two disciples were so blinded by their despair that they abandoned the place where salvation was to be found. Christ entered their desolation to draw them out through the Liturgy of the Word and He sustained and strengthened them with the breaking of bread. Often we give up because we cannot see, feel, hear and sense God but Christ walking with the two disciples has shown us that He is never far from our despair. He has never given up on us even when we have give up on Him.

So, at the moment of our greatest sorrows, the Eucharist should be the first place to go to, not the last. Here, at the breaking of bread, He keeps His promise to be with us till the end of time.

In summary, the Road to Emmaus may feel like any other post-Resurrection appearances but its impact is far-reaching. It shows how sacred scripture is steeped into the very life and practice of the Church [2]. So, if you are proud to be a Catholic, may this deepened awareness now inspire you to live even more faithfully your vocation. It would be the best expression of your pride and your gratitude for Christ’s continued presence in your life.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Petrine ministry is an important cornerstone in this process of handing over. It stands as guarantor for continuity.
[2] Let me give illustrate how “present” Christ is to us and how unaware we may be of it. There was a time when Catholics upon meeting the Bishop would ask to kiss the ring of the Bishop. Nowadays, when a Catholic asks the Bishop for permission to kiss his ring, apparently, some Bishops would reply: “The ring is in my back pocket”. It illustrates the confusion many priests and some bishops have of their priesthood. They have confused their “priesthood” with the Priesthood of Christ. Catholics venerate the person of the bishop or the priest not because they are “holy” but because they represent the Priesthood of Christ. Last week I mentioned the principle of “ex opere operato”. It is a principle which shows the extent and power of Christ’s presence. His presence can never be constrained by human frailty. When a priest is ordained, his palms are anointed and if he fell sick and required the Sacrament of Anointing, he would never be anointed on the palms. Instead, the anointing is at the back of the hands. According to Bishop Fulton Sheen, this is on account of his anointing for Holy Orders. See ]. This custom reveals how powerful the anointing at ordination is… that no matter how sinful a priest or a bishop may be, it can never take away the power of Christ to confect the Eucharist. Christ’s promise to be present to us can never be thwarted by human weakness. Furthermore, do you know a priest who is laicised, meaning that he has returned to lay state, can still grant absolution of sins in danger of death? The confusion especially amongst priests to shy away from the Priesthood of Christ, citing always that they are unworthy is perhaps a reason why we have lost the sense of Christ’s True Presence. By citing their “unworthiness” they are saying that Christ’s power is tagged onto their holiness. That would be “ex opere operantis”.

2nd Sunday of Easter Year A

2011-05-01T22:44:00.000+08:00

This Sunday is special for the Parish but not because it is Mercy Sunday. In the first reading you hear the echo of what we have been trying to flesh out in the last two years. About two years ago, at the soft launch of the Jubilee Year, we chose Acts 2:42 for our theme: The whole community remained faithful to the teaching of the Apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. This Sunday could have been the culmination of our Jubilee celebration.

Today is also dedicated to St. Thomas who is forever stigmatised as the Doubter. What is Thomas’ connexion to the first reading? In particular, how is he relevant to our Jubilee celebration?

Or, is he merely the once-a-year lecture we deserve to get for our lack of faith?

Calling him “Doubting Thomas” has been the tradition since the beginning of the Church. The Gospel seemed to be a convenient record of his lack of faith. But, ask where Thomas was when Christ appeared? A good question, no? Why was he not present? Someone speculated that he went out to buy bread because the others were too chickened out to do anything. But, could his absence be a commentary of the state of the brotherhood/community and the relationships found therein?

Note the contrast between the first reading and the Gospel.

The first reading describes the epitome or the quintessence of how Christians are supposed to be. It paints a picture of the perfect community. In our post-Easter celebration, this image is presented to us as an ideal to emulate or imitate.

Unfortunately, we breathe the less rarefied air of the Gospel. It is closer to our reality—our experience of community is often less than perfect. In a sense, Thomas’ doubt was not with Christ’s Resurrection. Thomas did not doubt the Resurrection as much as he doubted Christ’s ability to work through imperfection. How could he believe the testimony of this group of weaklings; men cowering behind closed doors and chief amongst them, a man who denied Christ three times? Could Christ be present through such a leadership and would Christ want to be present in such a community?

So, Thomas could have abandoned the brotherhood out of despair. His experience may mirror some of ours. In fact, towards our brothers and sisters we often express a lack of faith. We find it harder to believe people we know “too” well—precisely the phenomenon that Christ Himself faced: “A prophet is not accepted in his own country” or as Nathaniel under the fig tree said: “What good can come from Nazareth”?

In the post-Resurrection narrative, Thomas is pivotal to balancing the tension between an ideal to achieve and the reality we struggle with. Thus, his return one week later is decisive in our desire to live out an essential aspect of our Jubilee theme, namely, of brotherhood.

The Gospel tells us that there were two apparitions and a week separated the two events. Could Christ not have shown Himself to Thomas personally within the week? He could have but He did not. Instead, He waited for Thomas to find a way home to the brotherhood.

What can we learn from this “returning” within the context of our Jubilee celebration?

Firstly, the brotherhood, in other words, the BEC/community, the parish and the Church, is the locus where the Risen Christ is to be encountered. The brotherhood was central to Christ’s Resurrection apparition and it still is. In the context of the brotherhood, the disparity between what we accept to be the ideal with what we experience to be the reality results in a bewilderment exemplified in this question: “How can he behave like that?” This leads us to the second point.

We often labour under the mistaken notion that knowledge is virtue. How many relationships have been broken because we expect knowledge to be translated into action? I have witnessed this especially in marriages. Couples sink into despair from this failure of expectation. The truth remains that knowing is frequently not translated into appropriate behaviour. A good example took place right last week after the announcement about the uncharitable driver. A car still attempted to run David down as he was trying to direct traffic. Translate this knowledge-virtue divide into the political arena and you understand why this country is choking in cynicism. The point is: Conversion from knowledge to virtue is a lifelong process. For us Catholics, as long as there is conversion, there is always Confession.

Thirdly, ex opera operato is an important principle to remember when we deal with the painful reality of sinfulness in the brotherhood. Christ’s power works independently of the “sanctity” of the minister. That is the basis for saying that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist or how sins are truly forgiven at Confession and Anointing even when the minister celebrating these sacraments is unworthy. This power of the Risen Christ cannot be constrained or restrained by human frailty and He is infinitely more powerful than we dare trust Him to be.

But, like the recently concluded wedding of the decade, we want things to be “perfect”, which in itself, is not a bad thing because the desire for perfection is a subset of the quest for excellence. Couples want their marriage to be perfect. We desire that [perfection] of our family, our friends, our community, our parish, our priests and our Bishops too, do we not? In the context of Thomas’ doubt, this desire for perfection is not a reflexion of the drive for excellence but rather it is symptomatic of a lack of belief. Why? Our drive for perfection is fuelled by this assumption: If perfection is not accomplished here and now, it may never be. That is a subtle denial of the Resurrection.

Perhaps, you appreciate how Thomas’ return to the brotherhood is essential to the encounter with the Risen Christ because Christ the Head, is never far from His Body, the Church; Christ the Bridegroom, is never separated from His Bride, the Church. In fact, the words spoken by the Risen Christ on the first day and one week later point in the direction of the brotherhood because the brotherhood is a sacramental witness of Christ’s presence in the world. He greeted them twice with the Jewish greeting of peace and ultimately that peace is linked to the Beatitudes. We always think of the Beatitudes in terms of the Sermon on the Mount or the Plains depending on which Gospel you read but here Christ proclaims: Blessed are those who do not see but believe.

In our run-up to the Jubilee celebration on 3rd Dec, St Thomas’ return to the brotherhood is relevant because it was to him in the brotherhood that Christ proclaimed the Beatitudes. May our blessedness be the grace to see, to accept and to love the Risen Lord in the brokenness and the sinfulness and imperfection of our brotherhood, family, BEC and the Church.

Easter Vigil Year A

2011-04-24T10:01:00.000+08:00

Recently, an animation movie hopped into town, with a character named EB voiced by “l’enfant terrible” of the British entertainment scene—Russell Brand. He resigned from BBC after a scandal which involved leaving an obscene voice message on air during a phone-in session. This is just the side-salacious dish. What is more important is EB the character. Who is he and does he have anything to do with what we are doing tonight? From the looks of it. Nada. Nothing. First of all, EB actually stands for Easter Bunny and the premise of the movie centres around EB assuming adult responsibility of distributing Easter Eggs on the one day that matters most: Easter. In the movie, if at all any connexion can be made, the animation seems to show a total discontinuity with Easter by secularising what Easter is all about. They have this important deadline to meet with absolutely no connexion to why there is one in the first place. All we know is that there are billions of eggs to be distributed.

Present-day Easter Bunny has obscured the central message of what Easter is really about. Whilst Easter Bunny cannot be further away from Easter, the Easter Egg actually is strong symbol to what we are doing tonight. How? Let me tell you a story I read once about and it concerned a retarded [1] child named Stephen.

His Sunday school teacher wanted to illustrate the meaning of the resurrection and new life. So she gave them each an empty plastic egg shell and ask them to put an object into the empty shell to represent new life. One child had a tiny flower in it. “A lovely sign of new life," said the teacher. Next came a rock which the teacher thought could have been Stephen’s. But, its real owner shouted: “Moss! Moss on the rock symbolises new life”. The teacher had to agree. Then what followed was a butterfly and the child was quite sure that hers was the best. The fourth was empty and this time the teacher was quite sure that it should be Stephen’s. Politely, she passed it, to reach for the next plastic eggshell. Stephen spoke up: “Please! Teacher do not skip mine”. “But, it is empty”, said the teacher gently as not to “hurt” Stephen’s feelings. "That's right," said Stephen, "The tomb was empty, and that represents new life for everyone."

The story continues with Stephen dying on account of his deteriorating retardation. But, the profound insight we learn from such a written-off soul is what the Resurrection really means. The Resurrection’s most powerful symbol is the empty tomb. Contrast it with how we always want to fill up whatever is empty. I have this Easter Egg left outside my door by the Easter Bunny. It is filled with a heart-shaped chocolate piece. Most of our commercial Easter eggs seem to have missed the point.

My dear neophytes-to-be. You who will be baptised are signing up for this: the empty tomb whose emptiness symbolises the eternal life which Christ has won for you. St Augustine’s famous prayer about “restlessness” is helpful to understand what the empty tomb means. “O God, my heart is restless until it rests in you”. This restlessness is probably the equivalence of the empty tomb. There is a emptiness which can never be filled with things of this world. Try as we may, things of this world will only crowd our hearts but never will our hearts be at peace. Instead, things of this world can only weigh us down. No matter how much we try, we cannot belong to this world. Instead, that emptiness is symbolised by a restless heart longing for God. We may be in this world but we do not belong to this world.

Christianity is the Resurrection and no less. There is a difference between a resuscitation and a resurrection. Lazarus was resuscitated. It was miraculous but not really out of this world because he would die again. The resurrection is like a resuscitation and yet totally unlike it. According to Benedict XVI, and note that he uses the language scientists would go gaga about, “the Resurrection is the greatest 'mutation', absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life”. In the case of a resuscitation it might just be a newsworthy anomaly but this, the resurrection concerns us and the whole history of mankind. Through faith and baptism we become a part of this history.

So brothers and sisters, through baptism and a life lived in faith, death will never be able to hold on to us forever. The possibility of the Resurrection means according to St Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”[Gal 2:20]. And this is the implication of the Resurrection, it is not only now but for eternity

FOOTNOTE:
[1] Politically incorrect. Special is the preferred term. But, what is so special about special when the result remains being marginalised.

Good Friday Year A

2011-04-23T00:32:00.000+08:00

A favourite of Catholics is this hymn: Jesus keeps me near the Cross. The wordings were composed by a blind Methodist poet who when after she had found Christ turned her poetic skills to lyrical use. Amongst the Protestants, there is a certain steadfastness associated with the Methodist which might explain why, initially, the “Cross” featured prominently in their theological playground. What can their steadfastness teach us about the Cross?

The Cross should never be far from a Catholic’s field of vision. We should to take to the Cross like ducks take to water. Why is the Cross so important? After all, it is an instrument of torture and would not our attachment to it border on idolatry?

The answer is to be found in our experience. Today is not a day of obligation. Yet, instinctively, one of the largest congregation is the 3-pm Celebration of the Lord’s Passion. Part of the reason is scriptural. According to Luke’s Gospel, the ninth hour was when Christ breathed His last. Therefore, Catholic imagination makes a powerful link between the 3-pm death of Christ and our salvation. Just as an aside, do you know that it almost always rains here at about that time every Good Friday?

What is unfortunate is that the connexion the Cross and salvation often does not go further. Many of us naturally shy away from the Cross. We are plain happy to accept that Christ’s death saved mankind. But, listen to what "more" the Catholic Catechism has to say:

The Cross is the unique sacrifice of Christ, the “one mediator between God and men”. But because in His incarnate divine person He has in some way united Himself to every man, “the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery” is offered to all men. He calls His disciples to “take up their cross and follow Him”, for Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example so that we should follow in His footsteps”. In fact, Jesus desires to associate with His redeeming sacrifice those who were to be its first beneficiaries. This is achieved supremely in the case of His mother, who was associated more intimately than any other person in the mystery of His redemptive suffering. [CCC618].

The Catechism tells us in no uncertain terms that through the Cross, we participate in His sacrifice. This is why Paul says in Colossians 1: 24ff, “It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of His body, the Church”.

At baptism, the outline of the Cross is traced onto our souls which means the shadow of the Cross is never far. It cannot be that a person can live his or her life without ever the shadow of the Cross cutting across his or her path. The Cross is real for every baptised person to the point that if there were no cross in your life, you should worry.

The statues have been covered since the 5th Sunday of Lent and will be unveiled later and this unveiling is significant for it allows us to look at the one Crucified so that we might see Him with fresh eyes and look into our suffering not to lament “why” but rather to ask “how” our suffering is important to Him in His redemptive sacrifice to save the world. How can our suffering help His mission?

Our solipsistic world is pathetically lonely. We would like to think that our social networking—facebook or twitter—has torn down the walls of loneliness, but the truth of the matter remains that so many are trapped in loneliness. And it is this lonely world that has actually forgotten the real meaning of the Communion of Saints. We belong together in this Communion which we sometimes call the “Church”, the “Body of Christ” or the “Bride of Christ”.

A major characteristic of this communion is that it is organic and this organic whole is made up of inter-related parts in a communion of sharing. And it is this communion that gives some semblance of dignity to our suffering—whether our suffering be physical, psychological or spiritual. Bishop Fulton Sheen used to lament what he called “wasted suffering”. When you are sick your body certainly gets wasted but that is not the meaning here. Wasted suffering means that there are many who have not come to realise the meaning and spiritual value of their suffering in the context of the communion. No suffering within this communion is ever wasted if we offer it to Christ—the bridegroom and the head. He knows what He can do with our votive offering.

So, where Christ our Lord is concerned, no one is ever a bystander, no one here is a “belieber”, as the fans of Justin Bieber call themselves. Instead, in Christ, fans become followers. We follow Him and so the Cross, in whatever shape and size, will never be far.

The Church is rightfully a gathering of “sinners” for suffering is somehow linked to sin. Sometimes we suffer on account of other peoples’ sins. But, in Christ, all sufferings are redeemed and so sinners come so that Christ may redeem them and sinners also come because they would like to offer, no matter how insignificant or how poorly, their sufferings to Christ so that He may apply that self-sacrifice along with His in order to save the world. Earlier I said that that if there is no cross in your life, you ought to worry. Satan will never place obstacles for those who are going to hell. But if there is, never be surprised for as the hymn suggests…. “Jesus keeps me near the Cross, there’s a precious fountain”.

Holy Thursday Year A

2011-04-22T00:27:00.000+08:00

This evening, the Church is transformed into the Upper Room—the Cenacle. Later tonight, the Cenacle will fade into the Gethsemane. Today, the two foci are the two Masses which highlight two important Sacraments. Chrism Mass highlights the Sacrament of the Priesthood and the Last Supper highlights the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Traditionally, today is also called Maundy Thursday as it is derived from the Latin word Mandatum meaning “mandate”. Both Priesthood and Eucharist are born at the Last Supper and they are inextricably linked in such a way that there is no Priesthood without the Eucharist and no Eucharist without the Priesthood. In fact, this morning, just after midnight, I received a birthday greeting because someone had waited until after midnight to be the first to wish me “Happy Birthday”.

But, is there more to this mandate than highlighting these two Sacraments? Yes, there is. Christ may have given a mandate for which the two Sacraments came to be but it would not be off-tangent to assert that it is actually a day to think also about the Sacrament of Marriage, that is, if one looks at the bigger picture. Let me paint a bigger picture by sharing with you a little of my experience.

When I first started working in the parish, my reaction to difficulties was simply: “I don’t deserve it”. When I was exasperated, I would simply say “I don’t deserve this”—like this once when I had to go anoint a sick person in one of the swankier hospitals and was made to wait for visiting hours. Today, I recognise that kind of reaction as some kind of pride. Call it ageing or call it grace, I have come to realise that a less-than-comfortable tour of duty is supposed to be the rule rather than the exception, meaning, “difficulty” should be part and parcel of one’s duty as a priest. It means that one should not expect the priestly journey to be easy and this is where I realised how blessed I have been. It is a blessed realisation but more than that I am blessed because of you all. You have done so much more for me than anything I could ever do for you. You have helped me come to this realisation and I would say that this realisation is more than just the result of ageing gracefully. I might be flattering myself but I believe that this realisation is rather the fruit of the love of a people for their priest and vice versa.

This love between priest and people points to a larger picture. How? As I said earlier, the Mandatum is taken from John 13:34. Mandatum novum. A new commandment I give you: “Love one another”.

People, in general, think that the Mandatum novum, that is, this “love one another” is generically addressed to all Christians. It was as if on that night, Christ issued a generic commandment to all Christians. And we sort of accept it in its generic sense when we sing, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love”. Maybe it is just human to exist in generality but, generic love is a distillation of what is called particular love. Perhaps you may discern how the new commandment, the Priesthood, the Eucharist and Marriage are connected.

In a specific sense, Mandatum novum is addressed to all married couple because your particular love is the perfect and primary place for the practice of this new commandment. Why? Because, it is always easier to love everyone but much harder to love someone as it requires much self-abnegation. Often, you easily forgive the foibles of a stranger but would hold onto the faults of your loved one. “You did this or you did that” argument is an example of how we hold on to the faults of a loved one.

Marriage, as a sacrament, is premised on the relationship between Christ and the Church. Thus, man and woman represent Christ and the Church. In an analogous way, the relationship between Christ and the Church is also lived through the priest and the people. Priests are married in the sense that they are married to the people of God. For example: I can preach the same homily here and at St Ignatius. Let me tell you that the homily will sound better here than in St Ignatius. I dare speak a bit more. Why? Familiarity. It comes from the fact that here, you are my people and I am your priest. Such a relationship that can be recognised between Fr Albert and you too. He is at home here. You can ask Fr Peter for he was once upon a time the parish priest here or you can enquire of Fr Michael. I know he had a tougher time in Seremban which is why I consider myself so blessed here.

It has taken many years to appreciate this love of and for a people. I suppose I am less inclined to say “I don’t deserve this” because of love. And I always marvel at the fact that when I feel I can go no further, the grace of the sacraments carries me through. The Sacrament of Marriage has taught a lot about what my priesthood is supposed to be.

At Chrism Mass, which theoretically should have been celebrated this morning, all priests renew their commitment to priestly service. It should also be the moment where married couples do likewise. When you renew your marriage commitment, you begin to realise that you did not merely fall in love and then vowed to live a lifetime together but through the Sacrament, you vowed to live a lifetime of falling in love again and again.

Now you realise better that the Mandatum novum is directed both to priests and married couples. The love between a priest and his people, the love between husband and wife a powerful witness. The fortune of the Church is tied to the health of these two Sacraments, to the point that the failure of marriages will be matched by a drop in priestly vocations and the scarcity of priestly vocations is a reflexion of the collapse of the institution of marriage.

Tonight, both the Sacraments of Priesthood and Eucharist point to the Sacrament of Marriage. Mandatum novum is most powerful when priests are united to their people and husbands and wives are united in their love for one another. Make us grow in love together with Benedict our Pope and N. our Bishop and all the Bishops, with the clergy and the entire people, your Son has gained for you.

Palm Sunday Year A

2011-04-18T00:09:00.000+08:00

Today I want to answer two questions. Firstly, what lesson can we draw from the Gospel read before the start of our procession. Secondly, there is a shift in mood. Is it significant?

The Gospel before the Blessing of Palms is anticipatory in mood. Christ comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. There is an Old Testament reference to the Prophet Zechariah cannot be missed [Zech 9:9]. The Messianic King will come riding on a donkey.

The donkey is an animal of peace. Kings of old would ride on horseback during wartime whereas ceremonial processions were accomplished through the lowly donkey. Whilst Jerusalem erupted into a frenzy befitting a military commander, Christ came unexpectedly as the King of Peace, riding a donkey never ridden before, thus signifying the sacred task the animal was conscripted into.

The crowd shouted rightfully so: Hosanna. Analogous to our SOS, it meant “save us”. But, they were actually asking for nothing. They merely wanted a “god” who could do their bidding. In this case, a saviour to liberate them from their political overlords: the Romans. But, the God who came to save was not a military saviour. Instead, He came to save the people; He came to save all peoples from sin. This King riding on the donkey actually challenged the “status quo” because his liberation was not limited by political or geographical constraints. Moses may have initiated a geo-political liberation but this King was leading an exodus that was more than earthly, more than geo-political and socio-economic liberation because it involved the definitive passage from the reign of evil to the reign of God; from the rule of sin and death to the rule grace and life.

It might not mean a thing to you to know this. Why? Well, life is hard. We struggle through life and in our struggles, many of us will pray and ask that God be generous to us as He listens to prayers and grants our petitions. It is natural we do that but are we asking too little? Sometimes we aim so low without realising that God wants to give us more.

Thus, the shift in mood is necessary. The mood is deliberately sombre. We even covered statues or religious images from last Sunday so that we can better appreciate the immensity of God’s generosity. In fact, the solemnity requires that we put aside even our deepest concerns and focus on the Passion narrative. Before the Blessing of the Palms and the Procession, the King rode a lowly. Here at the Passion Narrative, the King has become the lowly donkey. He has become the beast of burden Himself for He now carries our sins and heals our wounds. This realisation does not come so easily but bereft of “earthly” comforts and pleasures, Holy Week is the graced moment to recognise the immensity of God’s generosity. Do not settle for less than what God wants to give. Holy Week reminds us that God wants to give us eternal life and no less.

5th Sunday of Lent Year A

2011-04-10T23:54:00.000+08:00

At first glance, we are taken up by the account of Lazarus and his raising. In fact, the shortest verse in the bible consists of two words: “Jesus wept”. Weeping is a common sight at every funeral where because of great love, people wrench their hearts out for their beloved. [It seemed that raising Lazarus was not really a miracle because Jesus cried so loud that He woke Lazarus].

Anyway, a closer scrutiny will reveal that the raising of Lazarus actually points to the mystery of the resurrection. At the heart of the resurrection we find the sacrament of eternal life. The question is: “How is the Eucharist linked to the Resurrection?”.

The Resurrection is a funny sort of belief. Why? We profess a belief in the resurrection but it seems like we believe it for others because, at the time of death, many of us will behave as if there is no Resurrection. Alternatively, you can say that we profess it at the head but not at the heart. This is not at all a negative judgement of people who grieve. Perhaps this fact can be explained by love. For those whom we ought to love—for example, a second in a room with an enemy whose eyes you want to gorge out feels like an excruciating lifetime. But, for those whom we love—a lifetime is but a second. There is never enough time for those whom we love. Whilst love may explain why we set aside our belief in the Resurrection during moments of grief, it is also love which founds our hope in the Resurrection.
This hope is expressed through the Eucharist because the Eucharist is the food for and of the Resurrection. How?

You remember John’s Gospel where Christ had a conversation with the Jews, right after He had multiplied bread and fish to feed 5000. The people who later came looking for Him were looking for physical nourishment. But, Christ told them to look for the kind of bread that will sustain them for eternal life. He offered Himself as that bread and He told them unambiguously, “If you want eternal life, eat My Flesh”. The result was confusion and practically all left Him. He turned to the Twelve: “What about you, do you want to go away too?” Simon Peter answered for all of us, “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life.”

Christ did not mince His words with regard to eating His Flesh in order to gain eternal life. The Body of Christ is food necessary for eternal life. Therefore, in the context of His unambiguous declaration, it would be ridiculous of Him not to provide us with the means for eternal life. Christ cannot make that statement without making sure that He supplies us with this Bread. This is what I mean by the Eucharist is at the heart of the Resurrection.

When we die we enter another plane of existence not constrained by time and space. Another plane of existence simply means that since time and space do not apply, the person may be dead with the body still in a coffin, yet he could already be purified. [1]

This is awesome implication for those who are baptised. The Church is at her best in the Eucharist because this is where the dead and the living are gathered as one to praise God. The altar is where the ecclesia militans, ecclesia triumphans, ecclesia penitens gather. And in order to be here, to enjoy the fruit of Christ’s Resurrection, the ecclecia triumphans and ecclesia penitens must have eaten the bread of eternal life when they were here on earth.

Let me tell you a real story to illustrate how important the Eucharist is to the Resurrection and here I want to reach out to those who are entering into a relationship that might lead to marriage.

I was called to the hospital the other day. It was an urgent call and I brought two important elements: oil for anointing and Holy Communion. I asked the usual question: “Can receive Holy Communion ah?”. The person said “No”. “Why?”. “Not married in Church”. It was an honest but painful answer. I discovered the reason which in the past may have made sense but here in the moment of life and dead, the reason no longer held. So I heard her confession and gave Holy Communion. She has since died.

It was a tragic funeral. She was not that old. In the room of the hospital where I had gone to, minus the pain of the so-called excommunication, I could sense that I was in the presence of a loving couple. At the funeral, I asked the husband if he loved her. It was a rhetorical question because the answer was obvious. Then I asked the reverse if he knew how much she had loved him. She had loved him that much to give up Christ. For more than 20 years, she deprived herself of Holy Communion for the man she loved. But all was not lost because at the moment of death, she regained everything and the Holy Communion she received was truly a “Viaticum”. It was really the Bread for the journey to eternal life. She received Christ who became her companion from this life to the next. And so, at the funeral, even as her body lay in decay, but freed from time, space and pain, and taking into consideration that she might already have been purified since we can only measure purgatory according to our time and space, she could already be present at the altar with the saints and the angels. Finally, I told the husband if he wanted to be close to her, the best physical location to be, where earth was joined to heaven, was to be at the Eucharist. This is an implication of the Eucharist at the heart of the Resurrection.

Those of you who are falling in love with non-Catholics. This is what you ought to remember: the Eucharist is our ticket to the Resurrection—it is the only Bread for and of Eternal Life. So, even at the beginning of your dating, this must be raised by you that you need Christ for your eternal life. It is perfectly alright to marry a non-Catholic. It is perfectly alright that your spouse does not convert. However, the rule that applies to children is different.

Why is it different? They need to be brought up and baptised as Catholics. Sometimes people will say, “Why cannot wait until they are old enough to think for themselves? In the matter of religion we should not force”. The answer lies in your children’s nutrition, education, health etc. What do I mean? In the case of dengue fever, you would never think of waiting until your child is 21 years old before deciding to seek medical help. Routinely you make decisions for your children. Baptism is a matter of eternal life because it opens the door to the Bread of Life.

And, you should be careful not to introduce a logical contradiction into your life. How? Each time you “communicate” [receive Holy Communion], you are assenting to the belief that the Bread you eat will lead you to eternal life. By refusing to baptise your child, you also saying: “I only believe it for myself but not for my child”. It is almost like saying, “I shall keep what is best for me but not for my child”. What type of mother or father are you? In the Gospel, Jesus Himself asked: “Would a father hand a scorpion to his child who asked for bread?”. But, if you can live with that, it just says quite clearly you do not know what you are receiving.

This is the 5th Sunday and we are inching closer to the mystery of our salvation. The raising of Lazarus is not really about him. Lazarus is just the side dish. What is at centre of this seventh sign is the Resurrection. The Resurrection is logically the promise of the Eucharist as St. Irenaeus (died 202) once said, "when our bodies partake of the Eucharist, they are no longer corruptible as they have the hope of eternal Resurrection" (Against the Heresies, IV, 18,5).

FOOTNOTE:
[1] All his sins, big or small, need to be purified before he worthy to join the angels and saints at the altar praising God. If a person dies and is not constrained by time and space, it means that funerals are for the living, never for the dead.

4th Sunday of Lent Year A

2011-04-04T01:20:00.000+08:00

The Gospel this Sunday makes sense in the context of a journey. The grace of the miracle is basically the gift of faith. The man had lived in darkness his entire life and the consequence of an encounter with Jesus resulted not only in the restoration of his physical sight but more significantly it unfolded his spiritual sight through the gift of faith.

Through a series of interrogation, the man grew in his acknowledgement of Jesus, first as simply the man called Jesus, then, a prophet, later, as a man from God and finally, as the Lord. In his final acknowledgement, he worshipped Christ as Lord and God.

What can we learn from the experience of the man born blind?
First and importantly, the blind man’s encounter mirrors the journey of those who belong to the catechumenate. The catechumenate describes this special group of people who are preparing for their baptism. The blind man confesses ignorance before the people, before the Pharisees and before Christ Himself. Notice that the blind man confesses his ignorance and each confession is followed by a “profession” or acknowledgement of faith. Hopefully, one should be able to trace the outline of this miracle in the life of each catechumen as the miracle highlights the progression from ignorance to faith. If the movement from blindness to sight traces the journey from ignorance to faith, then for every catechumen, baptism becomes the logical conclusion of one who has come to know and want to worship Christ as Lord and Saviour.
Second, who says that the Matrix is a new movie? There seems to be a parallel universe here because running in tandem with this gradual enlightening of the blind man, we observe a sweeping shadow shrouding the minds of the Pharisees as they grew profoundly blind.

How do we explain this profound blindness? Why is it that the same encounter can produce such differing responses?

In the case of the blind man, there was a humble acceptance of his ignorance. That humility opened the heart for the gift of faith to enter. In the case of the Pharisees, how else can we describe their gradual blindness except to explain it as a hardness of heart?

How can we understand this hardness of heart? On the one hand, to have eyes and yet fail to see is akin to what in moral theology is known as invincible [not invisible] ignorance. This is a form of ignorance that may exempt/excuse a person from moral consequence/culpability/responsibility due to its involuntary and irretrievable nature. In other words, it is ignorance beyond one’s control and therefore one cannot be held accountable. To give an example of invincible ignorance, we have a tribe in Papua New Guinea where the grass is taller than the average tribesman. They have never heard of Christ and no one has brought the Good News to them—they are an example of invincible ignorance because they cannot be faulted for not knowing that Christ is the Saviour of the world. Few people fall into this category.

On the other hand, to have eyes and refuse to see—that is what we might call “vincible” ignorance and the consequence is dire. Many would belong to this category. Even the man born blind, but in his case there was a difference. His acceptance of his ignorance and his desire to know led to his enlightenment. In the case of the Pharisees, they were adamant that they could see. They were blind to their ignorance; that explains Jesus saying at the end of the gospel: “Blind? If you were, you would not be guilty, but since you say, “We see”, your guilt remains”.

To have eyes and yet refuse to see is a form of obstinacy. Why is that so? First, people are blind or obstinate because they do not sufficiently recognise the reality of sin. This is crucial. You would be amazed because people have come to the Sacrament of Confession confessing not their sins but how good they are. Some have the mistaken but deadly notion that since they are merely committing venial sins, they are nothing. Second, it is easy to think of "vincible" ignorance as a refusal as if it were deliberate; as if people purposely want to be ignorant. What "vincible" or culpable ignorance may reveal is that we do not sufficiently acknowledge that sin blinds us, even venial ones. [1] Without this realisation, the result can only be that we remain at best lackadaisical or at worst indifferent. And so, if we accept faith to be a gift, and for it to grow, we need to jump into the waters of conversion. Faith flourishes only through continual conversion.

Many of us might not know that there is a prayer for Exorcism for this Second Scrutiny. The word is sadly made graphic in connotation as if it were defined by Linda Blair turning her head 360 degrees. Our imagination is aided by Paranormal Activities I and II. But, exorcism has nothing to do with the gruesome nor the ghoulish. Instead, the prayer emphasises freedom from the falsehood of sin and it asks God to free all who struggle under the yoke of the father of lies. In the language of the 2nd Reading, “try to discover what the Lord wants of you, having nothing to do with the futile works of darkness but exposing them by contrast”. Conversion requires that we constantly bring our lives into light.

Finally, today is Laetare Sunday and we rejoice because our salvation is near. The intent of “rejoicing” is to give us a glimpse of the future. Yet, the “break”, the so-called “jubilee year” actually highlights the seriousness of our Lenten practice of praying, fasting and almsgiving. We need a break only because what we have been doing is critical to our conversion. Otherwise Laetare is empty rejoicing. Lent in its spirit is one of withdrawal because deprived of creaturely comforts and food we begin to purify ourselves so that free from inordinate attachments, we may see better.

Many of us are ashamed of and by our sins unless we are Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. But, the more ashamed we are and the more we try to hide them, the more difficult will our conversion be. The gift of faith, without conversion, may also lead to blindness—just like the case of the Pharisees. Faith, for it to grow and not turn to blindness, it means that the conversion must never stop. It involves a lifetime.

FOOTNOTE:
[1] I was at Sunday School and I asked the children when they last went for Confession. Most, 99% said that their first was their last Confession. I gave an example of me going to hell. I asked this question: “If I were going to hell, what would happen if I killed a person”? “Nothing… I could kill and kill because I was already on the way to hell and it did not matter if I killed one more”. But, as it were, hopefully we are all aiming for heaven and so, venial sins mean something.

3rd Sunday of Lent Year A

2011-03-28T01:06:00.000+08:00

There is something familiar, almost tragic in the life this woman whom Christ encountered at Jacob’s Well. We could called her the Woman in the Well. Why? She had been married five times before and the sixth man she was with has left her empty and disappointed. What better describes her predicament than a well—a dark hole of incomprehensibility, of meaninglessness? St Augustine likened her condition to that of sin; the sixth man representing sin which only left her dissatisfied. Some of us may be living in wells even if we are not conscious of them; driven in despair or despondency to search for fulfilment in wrong peoples and places. Sounds familiar?

At the centre of today’s Gospel was a woman’s search and how an encounter with Christ led to her freedom from sin. A few scriptural facts may help us appreciate this encounter. First, Christ seemed out of touch with the reality that His people and the Samaritans did not always see eye to eye. There existed a wall of prejudices between these two groups of people. Second, social convention had already condemned this Samaritan to invisibility. She had to come to the well at an hour where people generally did not. Third, this was the longest conversation recorded in the four Gospels. The disciples may have been scandalised by His behaviour judging by their surprise.

The encounter was not a case of Christ deliberately over-turning social taboos. Instead, Christ broke barriers indicating that no human condition is outside the purview of His salvation. The conversation began simply with the reality of physical thirst that subsequently led to a fulfilment of her spiritual search. In the course of the dialogue, she told him, and we know it was lie, that she did not have a husband. There seemed to be a play between the numbers six and seven; with six indicating incompleteness and seven signifying perfection. Sin can never fulfil us no matter how promising. In her state of sinfulness, one can say that Christ came into her life as the “seventh” man. In meeting this seventh man and opening up to Him, she found what she had always been longing for.

We can surmise that she longed for the completion which only God can give—and not sin. St Augustine aptly described this craving as a restless heart searching for God. In a sense, she typified the search of every human heart. In searching, we often think in terms of objects or goals—money, fame, recognition, people and even God. But, our searching, at the same time, reveals what we truly need and who we really are—we long to be known, to be accepted and to be loved. To be known, accepted and loved are expressions of the search for who we are truly and what makes us whole.

Unfortunately, the prevailing wisdom has narrowed our search for who we are truly and what makes us whole to self-esteem, self-love and self-fulfilment—a need to be recognised, to be accepted and to be remembered. Christ is the only one who can fulfil this search. He is the only mirror that can reflect our true self to us. In this respect, Lent’s penitence is a potent path to this encounter with Christ. We deny ourselves of food and creaturely comfort to quieten our distractions. We intensify our prayers in order to strip away any vestiges of resistance to Christ and we amplify our charity so that we can meet Christ in His brothers and sisters.

We can appreciate the connexion between sin and the search for who we truly are. The woman in the well symbolises the slavery of sin and the search for freedom from sin’s slavery represents the desire to be who we truly are. This is the irony of it all. Our search does not end when we have discovered Christ. Here, the statement does not mean that Christ does not fulfil us. Instead our search does not end with Christ because it continues with Him. This is important as we can glean from the stages that Christ led the Samaritan woman through. Have you ever felt that there was a time when you were closer to God and now you no longer feel Him? That is what I mean when our search has somewhat “stopped”. We associate the time and space which we had as definitive of our relationship with Christ our Lord. For example, the high or the ecstasy after baptism or a retreat. Just like the 1st Reading: The Israelites wanted to return to the “sin” of Egypt only because of its familiarity.

Our search continues with Christ entails that we journey with Him into the deserts, up the mountains, down the valleys and into the plains. Saying that our search does not end when we have discovered Christ means that once we have discovered Him, where He is, there we want to be too. This mean discipleship—one who follows closely and intimately. Thus, the woman at the well is really a story of discipleship. She represents the meaning of Christian conversion. Conversion is not simply shrugging off sin. It is also discipleship. After her conversion, she became the Good News to her people.

2nd Sunday of Lent Year A

2011-03-20T23:30:00.000+08:00

The Second Sunday of Lent in Year A is dedicated to the Transfiguration. The events of Christ’s Baptism and Transfiguration are closely linked because they both marked the new beginnings in His life. Baptism launched Christ into public ministry whereas the Transfiguration inaugurated His final journey into Jerusalem and set on stage the saving event that was to take place there. According to Patristic writers, both these theophanies were also revelations of the Trinitarian God as we heard in today’s Gospel: The Father spoke, the Son was transfigured and the Holy Spirit was present through the cloud.

However, what is of interest to us is how these two theophanies—the Baptism and the Transfiguration—also reveal to us who we really are. According to St Thomas Aquinas, baptism is the sacrament of regeneration and the Transfiguration is the “sacrament” of Man’s second regeneration.

It is this second regeneration that we want to further reflect upon. Firstly, the word “transfiguration” is itself instructive. From the Gospel’s usage, there is a connotation of the stupendous or something extraordinary. His clothes became dazzlingly white or our translation has it as “his face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as the light”. It is as if the eyes of our mind are led to focus on the astounding or outstanding. Perhaps, the word “transfiguration” should be contrasted with another word which we also know, “disfigurement”. Here, the eyes of mind are led to the hideous or rather the once beautiful rendered ugly, like for example, a young woman’s beautiful face “disfigured” in an acid attack of a jilted lover.

The connexion between the Sacrament of Baptism and this so-called “sacrament” of second regeneration [Transfiguration] is more apparent now. Christian life is an ascent to Mount Tabor and what destroys this ascent to Transfiguration is sin because sin disfigures what was once made beautiful by the Sacrament of Baptism. According to the second reading, Christ abolished death and He has proclaimed life and immortality through the Good News. Through the Sacrament of Baptism, He calls us to be holy and invites us to the grace of the Transfiguration. Yet, the fact remains that many are gripped by the attraction of sin or are caught in the vice of disfiguring sin. How to explain, not excuse nor justify this attraction?

The first reading may help us understand why it is that we are attracted to sin. It begins with Abram’s father, Terah. The patriarch Terah uprooted his family from what we know to be the Fertile Crescent—that agrarian band of land framed by the Rivers Tigris and the Euphrates. They left Ur of the Chaldean for Canaan. But, when they came to Haran, which is at the source of the Euphrates, they settled there and it was here that Terah died. From here, we hear the call for Abram to uproot himself again.

What can we learn from this?

First, Haran was analogous to a pit-stop. Haran was never meant to be the final destination for Terah and his family which explains Abram being asked to leave again. Often in life, we mistake a pit-stop for the final destination. It is almost like stopping at one of the lay-bys along the North-South Highway and saying “This is where I am supposed to be”. That is what you get in the Gospel. Peter, with good intention, wanted to construct tents to commemorate a compelling encounter. He mistook the pit-stop for the final destination.

Second and more importantly, to settle for what is not our final destination always leaves us short. Sin is comparable to mistaking a pit-stop for a final destination. This may explain, and as I said earlier, not excuse nor justify our attraction to sin. In fact, it maybe help us in our decision making if we understand what sin is.

No one will knowingly choose evil. Sometimes we hear that people have to choose between “good” or “bad”. It is a no-brainer because there is really no “choice”. We always choose the good. Therefore, the attraction of sin lies not in its wrongness but our mistaken judgement or evaluation that it is something right and good. When we sin, we are in actual fact, choosing something which is less good believing that it is the good. It is, in a sense, believing that a pit-stop is good enough to be the final destination. The effect of settling for something less leaves us incomplete, or in other words, unformed [not fully formed], and therefore, disfigured. It makes sense now to say that “choosing” evil never leaves us satisfied even if at the time of commission, it feels satisfying. As such, our constant battle in life is not to allow sin to ensnare us with its false promise that it can fully satisfy us.

Lent consists of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Every moment of prayer and contemplation, every sacrifice of fasting and abstinence and every good deed of almsgiving and charity is a step along the ascent to Mount Tabor. As we journey into Lent, the Transfiguration, that moment when Christ discloses His divinity is also a foretaste of what the future is going to be like. We catch a glimpse of our future. We may be taken up by the brilliance of the event but let us not forget that the grace of the second regeneration also describes a process by which our bodies are slowly reconfigured. How? Simply through the rejection of sin. Every sin rejected transfigures our bodies.

Christian life is a daily grind, a constant struggle to reject sin, to choose the better as we long and wait for the day, either at our death or at His Second Coming, when He will change, transform and transfigure our lowly bodies into copies of His own body in glory (Phil 3:21).

The Alkitab [they are our Catholic Bibles because they contain the books called Deutrocanonical] issue basically boils down to this. For a long time, in the name of national security and interest, we have been accustomed to not rocking the boat, to have even adopted self-regulation and are restrained. The issue boils down not just to Christians but to any religious persons. Are they entitled to use their scripture without being subjected to state control? The time has come and our leaders have decided that enough is enough. The goal-post has been constantly changed. Conditions have been incrementally made more stringent. We need to consider if we are content with the crumbs that fall to the ground even though some morsels seem to be more generous than others. Perhaps it is time to consider that our rightful place is at the table and not at its foot. How to respond to this? Our leaders have called us to remain calm and pray and commit this issue to pray. Let us stand in solidarity and pray for our leaders and forour country.

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 9) Saturday 12th March 2011 1st Sunday of Lent Year A

2011-03-13T02:54:00.000+08:00

In the play Hamlet, there is a verse that goes like this: There’s obviously method in his madness. This evening, a current of many concerns are swirling together. It feels like mayhem or madness because we have the first Sunday of Lent and today/this weekend marks the end of the Novena of Grace [if you had come last Sunday, it was the 3rd day of the Novena, today being the 9th]. The context of this Novena is the Jubilee Year which also coincides with 50 years of Jesuit presence here. Historically, the Society of Jesus has been here far longer because St Francis Xavier was the first to establish a Jesuit presence in Malacca. Sadly, that presence was not continuous. [All we have are a sign board from the Antiquities Dept confirming that St Paul’s Hill belonged to the Society of Jesus and a tombstone of a Jesuit Bishop who probably died on the way to Japan].

In this circle of seemingly conflicting concerns, what is the method? How are the Novena, the Jubilee Year, the Jesuit presence and the 1st Sunday of Lent linked?

They are linked to a person whom we encounter in the desert. Right after His baptism, Christ entered the desert of purification. The three temptations correspond to the three evangelical vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. We think that the evangelical vows are for religious but, in actual fact, they are antidotes against avarice [poverty against greed], lust [chastity against giving in to seduction of comfort and mistaking this world to be heaven] and pride [obedience against arrogance]. There in the desert, Christ was purifying Himself for His mission—a mission that did not come from Himself. The connexion between purification and mission will help us find the method.

But, the method is not to be found in an idea. It is not even found in a vision or even a dream. There is no selling of an idea here and if at all this can be considered “selling”, the method is point out this person to you: Christ Himself.

An idea, a vision or a dream can leave you short. Ideas are what ideologies are made of. It is true that there may be different ideologies about Christ. For example, the last 50 years or thereabout we have been bludgeoned with an image that Christ was really a 1st century revolutionary—what we would call a “political agitator”. Many were sold on this idea that He came to “upset” the status quo and some bought into the band-wagon of “anti-establishment”.

That might have been a correct image of who Christ really was. He could have been this teacher of morality, a political maestro or an idealistic rabbi who stood against the establishment of the day. But, reflect upon what happened during the first wave of this movement for historical accuracy, called the Quest for the Historical Jesus. The best representative of this first wave was Albert Schweitzer, the great African explorer, missionary and doctor. They were trying to uncover the “real” Jesus stripped of all the theological coatings that theology had painted on him. But, their scholarly search stumbled only upon a Christ whose portrait resembled the one searching for Him.

For us living through a period of upheaval, it is not difficult to find a Jesus who reflects the longings of our era—a “liberator”. If there is one thing which the Quest has taught us, it is this: the “Quest” even though historically, and therefore, scientifically motivated, it was not entirely “objective” because each scholar's version of Jesus often seemed to reflect the personal ideals of the scholar.

So, how do we know who Christ is? That was why a chapel specifically for adoration was built. I know that this answer sounds stupid. But, we built a chapel where the Presence of Christ could be felt. Of course, He is present everywhere. But, this is the point. You receive Holy Communion. I would like to believe that as many as there are people here who receive Holy Communion, everyone is united in this belief: It is not just a piece of white bread but it is none other than Christ Himself that one is receiving. That is how we know Christ. Where do we find this Christ?

Richard Neuhaus once said: The world desperately needs the Church to be Church, not “do” Church differently. The theme for the Jubilee says this: As Church in faithfulness to Christ. As I have said before, the sinfulness of the sons and daughters of the Church does not erase the fact that the Church that was founded by Christ on the rock of Peter would withstand the test of time. The remains faithful to Christ. So, different fads may provide different “flavours” of Jesus if you like, but what remains is that any genuine encounter of Christ is through the sacraments and supremely the Sacrament of the Great Encounter is the Eucharist. Where does one confect the Eucharist if not at Mass? Thus, the Church confects the Eucharist, the Eucharist makes the Church—the Church is where you meet the same Christ.

So, the Mass is the great encounter and the Chapel we built is the prolongation of the encounter. Perhaps you may understand why we had the 1000-hour prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Fads will come and go but “Iesus Christus heri et hodie ipse et in saecula”—we adore the same Jesus Christ yesterday, today and forever.

Fashion is faddishly fickle. It will change but the only constant we have is the encounter with Christ through His sacraments. And this brings our method to the mission.—a mission that is of concern to us in the last 100 years or thereabout. Since the Industrial Revolution we have become more acutely aware of the injustice that exist amongst us. Christ was indeed prophetic when He said that the poor we will always have with us. I want to be clear that this prophecy was not a canonisation of “injustice”. Saying that the poor will always be with us is not the same as saying that the poor ought to be with us.

Instead, by His life, Christ brought the good news of salvation. He came to save us not only from eternal damnation but also to liberate us from the yokes of injustice. This mission has become our concern. It a crucial mission because the Church adopted a preferential option for the poor.

By now, you can see that we are concerned, and should be if we follow Christ, with our mission to and service of the poor. Ours—this parish and if you follow Jesuit spirituality—is supposed to be a faith that does justice. Translated, it is Christ and our love for Him which animates our actions for the poor. Otherwise, our actions on behalf of the poor will be nothing but expressions an ideology. The Communist tried to create a just and equitable society but where are they now? When ideology fails, where do we turn to? Thus, faith in Christ is necessary if Christianity is not perverted into a form of social ideology. In our era, Communism is Christianity without Christ.

In conclusion, I have been with you for nearly 10 years now. If I should die tomorrow, a fifth of my life would have been spent on forging a way for you to encounter Christ because your encounter with Him is the sine qua non, the one thing necessary before you take up His mission. There is a gulf of a difference between knowing the mission of Christ and the Christ of your mission. May this Jubilee be the grace of crossing from merely knowing the mission of Christ to an intense encounter of Christ Himself so that your every endeavour will be sustained by nothing but the deep love for Christ.

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 8) Friday after Ash Wednesday 11th March 2011

2011-03-11T20:25:00.000+08:00

Today is the 8th Day of the Novena of Grace and what areas have we covered so far? The thread through the last seven days has centred broadly on the call to holiness. This universal call demands that we draw lines. The boundary of holiness does not stop at the personal. It requires that we enlarge what is called the civilised public space for common existence—the space where mankind may flourish and civilisation may exist. Otherwise, we might sink into oblivion. But, in drawing the line for public engagement, we are at the same time drawing lines for sacred space. This space is sacramental in the sense that protecting this space shows our effort at allowing God to be God. The presence of sacred space indicates our respect for God’s sovereignty.

Second, holiness is linked to martyrdom. When we draw lines resisting compromise, we indicate a desire to be part of a great cloud of witnesses and that we on our part are willing to pay the price of witnessing, if necessary, with our blood. Accepting that we pay a price for holiness, we entered a reflexion that holiness is living truthfully and truth is defined not as a thing but rather a person Jesus Christ. Holiness consists of knowing Him, witnessing to Him and becoming Him who is the Truth. In trying to live the truth, holiness urges us to take responsibility for our decisions and actions instead of blaming others. Yesterday, I spoke on how the line of holiness that we draw must comes from a vision that extends beyond this world.

On Monday itself, we commemorated two martyrs of the early Church—Perpetua and Felicity. Today, we will revisit a topic which is close to their experience of martyrdom. For many of us, martyrdom would never be the price we pay. It is suffering. The embrace of an other-worldly vision will certainly involve suffering.

Suffering is a reality alien to so many of us. This sad state may be explained by the fact that we have trimmed our sails and settled into a more comfortable cruise called Christianity Lite.

In Christianity Lite, there is no place for suffering. Before you think that here I am advocating suffering, let me assure you that I am not. For example, I am not speaking of suffering arising from injustice as we heard in the first reading—strike the poor man with your fist. There is a difference between pain and suffering. Some pains are self-inflicted as when people make unreasonable demands on themselves, on others and on God. When our demands or expectations are not met, we experience pain. Furthermore, a dissolute life has consequences. But, this type of pain is not suffering because it can be managed—one’s expectations or changing one’s way of life.

Suffering, on the other hand, can only be embraced. Pain can be managed as in adjusting our unreasonable demands or it can be alleviated through medical means. However, we can only control pain up to a certain point. Beyond that, what? When one has taken all healthy precaution, one enters into the desert of suffering. Here in this desert, the only fitting companion is courage. Courage is no stranger to suffering because only with courage can suffering be embraced.

Why should we embrace suffering? Pain and especially suffering are not necessarily evil. If they were, then, they cannot fit into God’s plan of salvation. Instead, pain and therefore suffering is part of life after original sin. Take it at the level of the human cell. Its life may be described as a journey of pain and suffering. Why? Cells age and they die. A reason why there is a perception that existence or life is more “painful” is because this generation called “Body Beautiful” has unreasonably expected that bodies do not age or die. Or if you prefer a global outlook, take a look at the planets. We wonder where God is whenever a catastrophe befalls us, the recent being Christchurch where many lives have been lost and the latest, just two hours or so, a strong tsunami swept Sendai, Japan. Compare planet Earth with planet Mars. Mars is a dead planet, never mind the earthling obsessive search for water and life on the Red Planet. On Earth, the so-called presence of “suffering” is a sign of a living planet.

Thus, a good way to understand the presence of pain and suffering is this: The absence of God results in pain and suffering but pain and suffering are not proofs of God’s absence.

Thus, when Christ came to save us all, He did not come to liberate us from pain. He came to save us from eternal damnation and ultimate suffering is defined as the loss of eternal life. So, He who is sinless took upon Himself our suffering in order that we might gain eternal life. You can perhaps appreciate why not all suffering is evil.

According to John Paul II in his letter on suffering, he says that “Christ in bringing about human redemption through suffering has raised human suffering to the level of redemption”. It means that all of us that by virtue of sharing in Christ’s redemption, we also share in the world of suffering.

Human suffering, something which is beyond our control, is also a way out of our modern conundrum—the alienation created by our lonely existence. Do you remember that many of us were glued to the TV when we woke up on 26th December 2004? For some reasons, we were taken up by the sheer size of the catastrophe and the magnitude of the misery. But, a doctor took time off from his practice and he went there to serve those most afflicted. And there were many who did the same. Human suffering opens the way to human solidarity. Today, a solipsistic and solitary world is crying out for solidarity.

There on the Cross, Christ achieves the definitive solidarity that Man has longed for. As He stretched His arms on the Cross, He not only opened for us the road to salvation but He made it possible for humanity to stand in solidarity with one another. Therefore, our membership in the Body of Christ, through our suffering helps secure redemption. “In Christ, our suffering is not only human but also supernatural. It is human because, in suffering, we discover ourselves, our own humanity, dignity and mission. It is supernatural because it is rooted in the divine mystery of the Redemption of the world”.

In conclusion, let me rephrase what I said earlier that suffering is a reality alien to us. The truth is, suffering is not alien to us. We just do not want it.

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 7) Thursday after Ash Wednesday 10th March 2011

2011-03-10T20:17:00.000+08:00

The Lord is kind. In a sense, this statement is tautological because it is stating the obvious. Examples of tautology are colloquial expressions “repeat again” or “cuba try” [Malay, cuba = try] are tautological. He is kind because we are eating tonight. Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. It was not appropriate to “mark” the Novena. Tomorrow is Friday and we keep the “no meat” on Friday for the sake of universality. There is something to be said about “No Meat on Friday". A world that meanders aimlessly through the wastelands of vulgar democracy, "No Meat on Friday" is badge we wear with a certain humility. Let me be clear that I am not against democracy. Vulgar democracy tends to “democratise” diversity—to the point that nothing is important. What does it mean? Relativist ideology tells us that there are as many truths as there are the number of people here. “What is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me”… I know I sound repetitious and annoying. But think further, this so-called pluralist [many] ideology not only relativises but also reduces your voice to a no voice. The crass democracy of ideas when relativised make the world a lonelier world. Nobody can really share your believe—because everything is true—like the idiocy that all religions are the same. Well, I hold on to something as sacred even if it does not really speak to me because of the universal Church. That was why I wore the ashes yesterday… not because I am holy but because I am proud to see other Catholics, sinners like I am, walking around, proclaiming not their holiness but our common need of repentance and forgiveness. Today we are thankful for the Gospel because it ties in with the so-called evening gathering after Mass—it is simple because it reflects Lent. So let me dive in. How does it tie in? The first reading is a kind of repetition of last Sunday’s first. Moses set before the people choices. Choose life and blessing. The Gospel echoes this imperative that we choose and it ties in with our Novena of Grace OF St Francis Xavier. Accordingly, Francis was an ambitious young noble destined for worldly success until he met a man from a world totally unfamiliar to him. As in when two worlds collide, one was aggressive whereas the other was gentle. Francis resisted valiantly with contempt and ridicule even as Ignatius reached out humbly with kindness until one, when the aggression was sufficiently tamed, Ignatius proposed what we have in the Gospel today: “What gain, then, is it for a man to win the world and to have lost or ruined his very self?” In Francis, Ignatius discerned a soul not unfamiliar with nobility and open before his very eyes a vision of honour not determined by this world. Francis was challenged to draw his line of honour beyond the world that he can see. If glory was what he sought, then he should seek a glory which does not vanish like a dream. It was then that Francis gave himself over to Ignatius and through Ignatius, he began on the road to holy enlightenment. The very drive he had for the world was converted into a passion for the things of God. The passion for things of God can only be achieved through an interior battle to mortify his “flesh” and to bring all his sense under control. How is Francis’ conversion relevant to us? First, Francis himself is an embodiment of a vision not unlike ours. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this vision except that it leads ultimately to emptiness. The riches of the world is a promise which at the beginning will come across as fulfilling. It is when one has reached the pinnacle that further questions need to be asked. How did I come here? What have I given up or what have I taken in order to arrive here? What else after this? The sense of fulfilment that Francis sought was not to be found in this world. Thus, those who think that the ultimate in this world would be satisfactory would be driven to search for the rainbow’s end. Second, Ignatius brought the shadows of Francis’ passion into light. He gave him a vision which puts to pale everything that could be passionately achieved. In the end, Francis saw the world through Ignatian lens where the Blessed Trinity, seeing the world in need of salvation, decides that the 2nd person should become man to save the human race. It was this vision that sustained Francis’ endeavours in this part of the world. This is the second day of Lent. Yesterday we put on ashes, and for some it begins a forty days of “whatever”… no liquid diet (meaning nothing more than 5% alcohol), no misdemeanour, no gambling, no smoking, no chocolates, no face-booking any number of “noes”. For some of us, a “no” can be cosmetic. Before you think I am ridiculing your Lenten practices, let me assure you that I am not. Instead I would like to make sense of what you do during Lent in the light of Francis’ leaving Europe for Asia. Unlike modern migration, Francis was not looking for a better life in Asia. He came to share the vision of another life. St Peter in his first epistle, one of the so-called Catholic epistles, Catholic not in the sense of the “Catholic” Church, but Catholic in the sense that it was addressed not to a particular community. It was addressed to the “whole” Church. St Peter’s letter was descriptive of the early Church—a sense of alienation. He speaks of their existence by using two Greek words: Parapaedemoi and paraokoi. They sound alien until you realise that the word economy has its roots in one of them. He used them interchangeably and can be translated as wandering sojourners and alien residents. A good contemporary word is “refugee”—Christians are the original “Pendatangs”. In a sense we are refugees/pendatangs because Christians live for another world. Our vision is of that world. But, what have we? We have acclimatised, naturalised and we have grown roots too deep. There are two groups of people here. First, there are those who defend their rights to be here of the good old days. Second, there are those who look for the greener pastures—herons flying south. Both actually live for the now thinking that the promised land is here and now and can be attainable in this life. Penances make no sense at all. God does not need appeasement. What He desires is that we go home. All acts of “penances” only make sense because we are supposed to be agile enough for the next world. They are undertaken not for themselves… if they were, then they are cosmetics. Holiness is a journey to that world. England, Australia, Malaysia, United States or anywhere that takes your fancy, no matter how comfortable, how durable, how conducive and most of all, how desirable this world is nothing but a glorified bus-stop.

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 6) Ash Wednesday 9th March 2011

2011-03-09T20:13:00.001+08:00

You know, homilies are funny creatures. There are times when in the toilet, I get brilliant inspiration and I would be waxing lyrical crafting what I would vainly think, a lofty homily. But come the time to commit to pen and paper, all heavenly ideas disappear like the proverbial will-o’-the-wisp. It is enormously frustrating. Anyway, let me begin with a story, a true one because it involved me.

I was out for movie. It was a midnight movie. [If you regularly keep an 18-hour day, midnight is the only time for recreation]. Seated the row behind me but a couple of seats to my left was a gaggle of giggly girls. They were talking. You know that type of conversation which comes from “You must know that I am here”. [Like on mobile phone in a lift or on the LRT]. They carrried on talking loudly because we have come to tolerate such behaviour. As the movie started they showed no sign of abating. I mimicked our universal sound for silence: shhhh… Well, you guess it. One of them shushed me back and they carried on talking. Then in my best Tamil slang, I turned around, raised my voice a little and said, “Oi, [censored], diamlah”. (Hey, [expletive], shut up). That caught my two companions by surprise. But judging from the general laughter, it seemed that I had done the right thing for soon we settled placidly into watching the movie. Did I get it right? Not the settling into the movie part but shutting them up?

Today, we continue to tread the path to holiness. Appropriately, it is Ash Wednesday and so we shall speak of sin—not so much the act of sinning or the sin but rather the responsibility for sin. Our world today is troubled not as much by sins or the prevalence of sins as it is by the lack of responsibility for sins. At the time of the incident, it was funny but I am not proud of what I did. The point is this. No matter how extenuating the circumstances may have been, still it was unwarranted that I should have used an expletive. In my defence, I could claim: “Those stupid girls made me do it”. The blame-game is as old as Adam. “The woman made me eat the apple”. We live in a world that has shrugged off personal responsibility and we have assumed blaming to be reason for our actions—from blaming my parents to blaming my spouse to blaming everyone else. Without breaking the seal of Confession, do you know how often priests hear Confessions of details that a so-called sin was caused by someone else. Many of us do not see the connexion between blaming others and mental illness. What do lawyers do when they want to absolve their clients of a crime? They advise the client to plead insanity.

We have come full circle from the ancient philosophy of sin as a cause of diseases to illness as the excuse for one’s sin. The point is, “others” may be mitigating factors but the buck needs to stop somewhere. Ultimately there must be one who sins. There is a term which you may have heard of. It is called “affective maturity”. It is not just about emotions but also about the ability to enter into relationships. An important criterion of affective maturity is taking responsibility of not only your emotions but also your decisions and actions. According to a priest involved in the Marriage Tribunal, gross immaturity is frequently the ground for annulment. And here, it has nothing to do with great accomplishment, intelligence or success. On the contrary, many who apply for annulment are intelligent and successful and yet, the dysfunctional patterns of their relationship often betray an inability to accept responsibility. Thus, the annulment process is really rehabilitative in this sense. It allows the person to take responsibility for his or her past actions.

But, unfortunately what happens is that sometimes both parties will be blaming the other for the state of the failed marriage. The Church’s canonical sanctions are pastoral and catechetical. It is never punitive. Instead it is rehabilitative. Society at large reacts to the Church—either it is too soft [as in the case of paedophilia] or too harsh [especially the excommunications]. Those who think it is too soft believe that sinners should be locked up and keys thrown away. But, there is always a way home.

Have you seen Assumption Church’s car sticker? It says: God allows U-turns. To those who think that we are too harsh, canonical sanctions are meant to impress upon us the gravity of our actions. If actions have no consequences, it becomes a licence for sin. With sanction always comes an invitation for the sinner to return home. Some parts of our penal system attempts to reflect the rehabilitative dimension of the Church but more and more, it draws the line when it comes to the death penalty. People cannot be forgiven and neither can they be rehabilitated. The only solution is to be rid of them. But, without the possibility of “rehabilitation” there is no possibility of taking responsibility.

The Church has a role even more crucial in this post-modern world. She tries to give clear moral guidance so that we may take responsibility for our actions. Why? When Modernity came, the world came to equate “intelligence” or “rationality” with morality, in the sense that, what was possible was also moral. For example, just because we can produce test-tube babies means it is OK. But, Modernity was a dismal failure because rationality did not prevent two great wars. And now we are in Post-Modernity which is a reaction to Modernity and its basic principle: if rationality did not prevent us from sinking into barbarism, “Why bother now”? This explains much of our chaos.

Today is Ash Wednesday—a time to appreciate the gravity of our actions. Have I sinned or not? Note that Communion is denied to those who are not baptised or are in a state of serious sin, whereas the imposition of ashes does not discriminate. Why? Because everyone is a sinner and therefore in need of saving grace. Imposition of ashes is only symbolic and it will remain as such unless one takes responsibility for one’s sin. The 2nd Reading says: For our sake, God made the sinless one into sin. Christ the truly innocent one took on the responsibility for our sins and paid for it on the cross. Since we are not Christ and therefore cannot do it for others, should we not do it just for ourselves? For Christ’s sake. [Footnote: Coming back to expletives—bad words, four-letter words, etc. Its pervasiveness in the broadcast media may be an indication of how dumb-down world has become which explains why we cannot take responsibility for our actions. In fact we are so dumb-down that we have come to believe that big, loud and strong are the only ways to express ourselves. So, a “real” movie has to have loud noise, car chase, destruction and mayhem. But, scholarship has something to do with contemplation—what I said yesterday about knowledge. Silence, unseen and the ordinary allow us to step back and think things through. I guess the contemplative religious have something to teach us. Behind their walls they stand as a fortress for civilisation. Once I was called up by Fr Paul Tan then. He told me that there was a complaint against me. I had been liberal in the use of expletives. I told him, quite cheekily, I like Cantonese because their expletives sound like music to my ears. Music or not, the liberal use of expletives is a symptom of stupidity. I am brought to mind Winston Churchill. It seemed that a certain Lady Nancy Astor once said to him, “Winston, if I were your wife, I’d poison your tea”. And, his response was simply: “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it”. He did not resort to calling her by names and even if he did, it was done with style. A certain Bessie Braddock accused him: “Sir, you are drunk”. Churchill’s response was, “And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober”. Today, our response to anything disagreeable is simply crass and unrefined. How to be civilised?

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 5) Tuesday 8th March 2011 9th Week in Ordinary Time Year I

2011-03-08T20:07:00.002+08:00

The Gospel this evening is helpful to our Novena reflexion. The setting consisted of the religious bureaucracy [chief priests and elders], the spiritual elite [Pharisees], the scholars [scribes] and the partisans of a puppet ruler [Herodians]. It was a setting best described as practical political prostitution because they all had different agendas and ordinarily they had no reasons to come together. But in the interest of taking Christ down, they came together under the guise of honesty, under the guise of searching for what was true. The answer of Christ cut through their hypocrisy.

Thus, the Gospel setting leads us down another path of holiness. Holiness is related to truth. In a sense, the authorities were doing the right thing even though the intention was questionable. Holiness is living the truth because to know the truth is to act on it. What was hypocritical of this expedient religio-political group was that they had no intention of living the truth.

So what does it mean to live the truth? To answer this question, we need to clarify three things. Firstly, how do we come to know. This is not easy at all. In fact, in the current climate of post-modernism, forging consensus is made difficult by “how” we arrive at the truth. Our present day theory of knowledge largely defines the act of knowing as a subjective act. In a relativist paradise, this rule is ultimately expressed as “What I know as true is true for me”. But, knowledge is never merely a subjective act of the individual because the act of knowing is objective in the sense that the community also participates in the act of knowing. That is why knowing is inter-subjective, meaning that it is “objective”—that it can be brought out into the open. If we follow the ancient philosophers of Greece, knowledge is always of the truth. Therefore, the act of knowing and the object known are both objective in the sense that how we arrive at and what we arrive at must be open to question. Thus, to know is an objective endeavour because it is not dependent on how I think or what I feel.

Secondly, what is truth? Again, to define “truth” is to sink into a philosophical quagmire. Yet we must. Truth “is” and that is why knowledge is of the truth. Knowledge is of what “is”—meaning, of reality. Therefore, truth, if it is to be true, has to be the same for all of us, rendering the earlier adage “what is true for you is not true for me” as really untenable. And yet, many in this post-modern world hold on to this relativistic position. In a space as big as this church, there are as many “truths” as there is the number of people.

But all is not lost because thirdly, knowledge is never for itself. To know truth is not just to know “something”. Thus, the knowledge, which is of the truth, serves a purpose. For example, knowing that there is a drain in front of you means taking appropriate measures to avoid falling into the drain.

When I was younger, I used to like “facts”. You know, "the capital of Zimbabwe is Harare and the former name of Zimbabwe is Rhodesia”. This form of “knowledge” serves a purpose, that is, knowledge is power and knowing and rattling facts can be quite impressive. But, I have stopped watching any of these “knowledge” documentaries because the purpose of this type of knowing is simply a form of gluttony.

Knowledge serves a purpose and it is more than just “naked” power. Knowledge serves a purpose and it is about change. Let me pause for a recap. Both the act of knowing and what is known must be objective. This actually ties in with what I have said in days past. The drive to know is a rational endeavour because it takes me into the public arena—the space we call reason or discourse. Thus, if knowledge is not just for itself, then it must serve the purpose of changing people for the better; otherwise it is nothing but intellectual gluttony—an expression of an insatiable appetite to know—akin to the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder of “hoarding”.

Truth changes us and because it changes people for the better, it leads us to make difficult decisions such as to accept, to forgive and to love. Here, we are brought back to the Gospel. The group that posed Christ the question wanted to know but was not willing to change with what they have come to discover. Truth serves no purpose for them. Were they really after the truth that liberates or just information to destroy? [For many of us, information to store, to hoard for this future use which might never come].

In this respect, we have a lot to reflect on the purpose which comes with knowing. First, to know always involves change. It cannot rest merely at the “grasping” of what can be known. Let me give an example—the innocuous pastime called gossip. People who engage in gossiping always believe that they have “truth” on their side. When chided, a response you might hear is “It is true what…”. Even though there is “truth” in gossips, the question to ask is what sort of purpose do they serve? Is it to disseminate so-called “truth” or is it just an “assertion” of power since knowledge is power? [People use “information” or knowledge to blackmail or to destroy]. Gossips serve no purpose except to feed our salacious appetite to know. In the end, gossips, instead of leading us to ethical behaviour will end up destroying the community. To further illustrate the point that truth involves change, let us take a look at marriage. A spouse may be overly eager to know the truth about the husband or wife’s fidelity or infidelity. So check on the SMSes, emails etc. The more important question is what will he or she do with the unpleasant truth? Will the knowledge save the marriage? Humbly I submit that I know enough marriages to know that that kind of “need to know” does not help marriages. Here, I am not counselling blissful ignorance. I am saying that if you are not ready to know, then it does not help to know.

Because, we often think that truth is about transparency and disclosure. A crucial criterion for transparency is whether a disclosure would be constructive. Only then will truth become liberating. In a way, I am glad that the penalty for a priest breaking the Seal of Confession is excommunication. Why? In Confession, we know a lot of secrets—truths—about peoples’ lives. And yet, we have no right to disclose no matter how true that may be and even if we should be put to death.

In the end, if holiness is living the truth, the question to ask is not what “truth” is. It would be good to realise that truth is not a “thing” to know. Truth is a person to know: Jesus Christ. He does not hover behind the truth. He is the truth and Christian holiness consists of knowing Him who is THE truth, witnessing to Him who is the Truth and becoming Him who is the Truth.

Thus, the Gospel setting leads us down another path of holiness. Holiness is related to truth. In a sense, the authorities were doing the right thing even though the intention was questionable. Holiness is living the truth because to know the truth is to act on it. What was hypocritical of this expedient religio-political group was that they had no intention of living the truth.

So what does it mean to live the truth? To answer this question, we need to clarify three things. Firstly, how do we come to know. This is not easy at all. In fact, in the current climate of post-modernism, forging consensus is made difficult by “how” we arrive at the truth. Our present day theory of knowledge largely defines the act of knowing as a subjective act. In a relativist paradise, this rule is ultimately expressed as “What I know as true is true for me”. But, knowledge is never merely a subjective act of the individual because the act of knowing is objective in the sense that the community also participates in the act of knowing. That is why knowing is inter-subjective, meaning that it is “objective”—that it can be brought out into the open. If we follow the ancient philosophers of Greece, knowledge is always of the truth. Therefore, the act of knowing and the object known are both objective in the sense that how we arrive at and what we arrive at must be open to question. Thus, to know is an objective endeavour because it is not dependent on how I think or what I feel.

Secondly, what is truth? Again, to define “truth” is to sink into a philosophical quagmire. Yet we must. Truth “is” and that is why knowledge is of the truth. Knowledge is of what “is”—meaning, of reality. Therefore, truth, if it is to be true, has to be the same for all of us, rendering the earlier adage “what is true for you is not true for me” as really untenable. And yet, many in this post-modern world hold on to this relativistic position. In a space as big as this church, there are as many “truths” as there is the number of people.

But all is not lost because thirdly, knowledge is never for itself. To know truth is not just to know “something”. Thus, the knowledge, which is of the truth, serves a purpose. For example, knowing that there is a drain in front of you means taking appropriate measures to avoid falling into the drain.

When I was younger, I used to like “facts”. You know, "the capital of Zimbabwe is Harare and the former name of Zimbabwe is Rhodesia”. This form of “knowledge” serves a purpose, that is, knowledge is power and knowing and rattling facts can be quite impressive. But, I have stopped watching any of these “knowledge” documentaries because the purpose of this type of knowing is simply a form of gluttony.

Knowledge serves a purpose and it is more than just “naked” power. Knowledge serves a purpose and it is about change. Let me pause for a recap. Both the act of knowing and what is known must be objective. This actually ties in with what I have said in days past. The drive to know is a rational endeavour because it takes me into the public arena—the space we call reason or discourse. Thus, if knowledge is not just for itself, then it must serve the purpose of changing people for the better; otherwise it is nothing but intellectual gluttony—an expression of an insatiable appetite to know—akin to the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder of “hoarding”.

Truth changes us and because it changes people for the better, it leads us to make difficult decisions such as to accept, to forgive and to love. Here, we are brought back to the Gospel. The group that posed Christ the question wanted to know but was not willing to change with what they have come to discover. Truth serves no purpose for them. Were they really after the truth that liberates or just information to destroy? [For many of us, information to store, to hoard for this future use which might never come].

In this respect, we have a lot to reflect on the purpose which comes with knowing. First, to know always involves change. It cannot rest merely at the “grasping” of what can be known. Let me give an example—the innocuous pastime called gossip. People who engage in gossiping always believe that they have “truth” on their side. When chided, a response you might hear is “It is true what…”. Even though there is “truth” in gossips, the question to ask is what sort of purpose do they serve? Is it to disseminate so-called “truth” or is it just an “assertion” of power since knowledge is power? [People use “information” or knowledge to blackmail or to destroy]. Gossips serve no purpose except to feed our salacious appetite to know. In the end, gossips, instead of leading us to ethical behaviour will end up destroying the community. To further illustrate the point that truth involves change, let us take a look at marriage. A spouse may be overly eager to know the truth about the husband or wife’s fidelity or infidelity. So check on the SMSes, emails etc. The more important question is what will he or she do with the unpleasant truth? Will the knowledge save the marriage? Humbly I submit that I know enough marriages to know that that kind of “need to know” does not help marriages. Here, I am not counselling blissful ignorance. I am saying that if you are not ready to know, then it does not help to know.

Because, we often think that truth is about transparency and disclosure. A crucial criterion for transparency is whether a disclosure would be constructive. Only then will truth become liberating. In a way, I am glad that the penalty for a priest breaking the Seal of Confession is excommunication. Why? In Confession, we know a lot of secrets—truths—about peoples’ lives. And yet, we have no right to disclose no matter how true that may be and even if we should be put to death.

In the end, if holiness is living the truth, the question to ask is not what “truth” is. It would be good to realise that truth is not a “thing” to know. Truth is a person to know: Jesus Christ. He does not hover behind the truth. He is the truth and Christian holiness consists of knowing Him who is THE truth, witnessing to Him who is the Truth and becoming Him who is the Truth.

Novena of Grace of St. Francis Xavier (Day 4) Monday 7th March 2011 Ss Perpetua and Felicity

2011-03-07T19:56:00.000+08:00

There are eight women mentioned in the Roman Canon or the Eucharistic Prayer I. The first woman is mentioned before the consecration. “In union with the whole Church, we honour Mary, the ever-virgin Mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God”. This evening we celebrate two of the other seven: Perpetua and Felicity.

They were five of them martyred together in the 3rd Century. It sounds a bit distant from Apostolic times till you realise that they were martyred at latest circa AD210, a hundred years or so after John’s Gospel was written. Who were they?

According to a historical account, violent persecutions broke out during the reign of Emperor Severus. [With a name like Severus, how could it not be severe, you ask yourself]. Five catechumens were detained for the faith in Carthage. [Present-day Carthage is a ruin in the capital city of Tunisia]. Today we celebrate the memorial of both Perpetua and Felicity. The details of their martyrdom have reached us through a contemporary account—namely of Perpetua herself. It came from her own diary. She was of noble rank. Her companion, Felicity was a slave. Perpetua had just given birth and was suckling. Felicity was with child but gave birth just two days before the games—the day their execution took place. Both were baptised whilst in captivity.

They remained faithful to the teachings of the Apostles even though they were catechumens and for that reason they are relevant to us.

Consider the circumstances surrounding their ordeal. All through her imprisonment, Perpetua was tempted in the person of her father for he consistently begged her to apostatise. However, she was concerned for the well being of her infant and upon knowing that the child was in good hands she said, “The prison has been made a palace for me”. Imagine Felicity, who was rather apprehensive that she would not be granted the grace of martyrdom since Roman law forbade the execution of pregnant women. In the end, she was able to give up her child to a Christian woman.

The details of their martyrdom as described by Perpetua herself are not what we are accustomed to. Would you not consider Felicity’s apprehension a bit bizarre? But, that is fundamentally what it entails when one remains faithful. The teaching of the Apostles is more or less set, in the sense that it is there. It is being faithful that exacts a price to be paid. Are we willing to pay the price or is Christian martyrdom a dead language?

We may or may not be aware that martyrdom is alive. Not a few days ago, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Minister for Minorities, a Catholic, was gunned down. In different parts of the world, Christians have had to pay the ultimate price for their faith in Jesus Christ. According to the Vatican, between 2001 and 2008, more than 130 Catholics, who are known, have shed blood for the faith. Many more could be hidden.

If Christian martyrdom is not a dead language, perhaps, our not being acquainted with it, explains why it remains unreal for many of us. Yet, according to those attuned to it, Christian martyrdom today remains one of the greatest untold stories. John Paul II himself described that at the end of the last century, the Church had once again become a Church of the martyrs.

For us to appreciate martyrdom, we really need to hear more stories of Christian struggles. Unfortunately, we top the mock list and to be fair, in some cases we do deserve it. But, in the category of fair recognition, not so much for the sake of triumphalism, we come in last. It means that the media is often silent in the case of Christians dying heroically. The stories of Christian struggle are often told in silence.

Perhaps, the readings themselves may help us understand why it is that we are not so acquainted with martyrdom. They basically tell us that it does not pay to be good. Poor Tobias, despite his goodness, still went blind. The landowner, in his kindness leased out his land, only to have his son killed. In short, it does not pay to sacrifice.

Negative media and the lack of heroism have contributed to a dampening of our spirit of sacrifice. Furthermore, we also shy away from sacrifice because sacrifice takes the shape of suffering. Unless we accept this, the idea of dying for someone else, let alone for Christ remains unreal.

The last few days I have been speaking about holiness and how a notion that we often associate with those who are far removed from reality is really accessible to all of us. So, here by speaking of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, am I backtracking? Because, by all appearances, martyrdom seems to be inaccessible. But, au contraire, martyrdom and holiness are essentially linked. Although holiness comes within the reach of every Christian, it comes with a price. That price is martyrdom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian put to death by the Nazis, once said that grace is not cheap. Every day when we decide to live a life of holiness, when we draw lines and resist compromising, we enter into the territory of martyrdom for that is what it really means: witnessing. There is something about holiness that is beautiful; likewise martyrdom. Its beauty can never be hidden. That is when we move from private Christian living to public Christian holiness. I believe all the martyrs recognise this beauty. To the world it may seem like a valueless piece of stone. But, to the enlightened, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Hence, sanguis martyrum - semen christianorum, the blood of martyr is the seed of faith.