32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

A couple of years ago, I was in an Air Asia flight. We were still on the ground and as the aircraft pushed back to take off, there was a loud bang resulting in the plane plunging into darkness. With smoke bellowing from one of the engines, all pandemonium needed was someone to shout, “Fire”. None of the emergency exits was deployed but that did not stop the mad scrambling to nowhere. I sat stunned not because I did not want to live but rather I was astounded by an unalloyed display of the human instinct for self-preservation. It was surreal but I guess I can imagine the cabin chaos prior to the ill-fated Lion Air JT610 plummeting into the sea.

Today we get two radical portraits of the opposite—a total disregard for self-preservation. Both the widows at Zeraphath and in the Gospel of Mark were knocking at death’s door and yet, one thought not of herself nor of her son but the Prophet Elijah’s need, which to me, came across as entitled and the other, who without second thoughts, put all she had into the collection. They invite us to reflect on the grace of generosity, its relation to material possession and how to sublimate our need for self-preservation.

Firstly, there is a category called the poor. A common conception that the poor are so because of laziness or that they lack of initiative. This is especially for those who pride themselves as having a work ethics. If you come across a young and healthy man begging, your first thought could be: “got hands and feet, why not work”? There could be myriad reasons for not working but for Jesus, the presence of the poor was a condemnation of a system that gave rise to them. His society was so structured that some are fated to remain destitute—especially the widows, the orphans and the poor. If that system is alien to us perhaps a modern example might help. When a priest falls sick, do you think he will be admitted to the 3rd class ward of Sultan Aminah Hospital? By the very fact that he is a priest, he is already accorded better access to health care. The usual rationale “Oh we need our priest to be healthy to serve us” may be true but still it betrays an arrangement that that values a class over another. Some are more valued over others. It is fact that those who have more have better access than those who are poor. This leads me to the second point.

When we moralise about wealth, the line is pretty thin. We are often not far from envy. What we do not like about the rich may masks a resentment because we have no access (avenue) to their excesses (extravagances). How we wish we could live like them—signing contracts worth millions or sailing on a RM1B yacht surrounding by the rich, famous and the voluptuous—chuffing champagne and cramming down caviar canapés. Maybe not in that way but you get the gist. We have been simply seduced by suggestions that an opulent lifestyle is preferable to the penury of abject poverty. It is better to be full than to be hungry. The question is how to be full in a way in preserves our human dignity and this brings me to the third point.

There has to be a better to think about wealth than not having it. Meaning that the issue is not “to have or not to have” or that for salvation, poverty is preferable to riches. We take our cue from the Apostles’ Creed. I believe in the Communion of Saints. This communion helps us to appreciate that wealth in itself is not a bad thing, that its roots is communal rather than individual. It is less an indicator of personal possession because its connexion is communal as suggested by the word: commonwealth. We witness this in the early Church where the community pooled everything they had and they shared it amongst themselves in such a way that no one was ever in want of what they needed. 

The concept of pooling everything together may be an ideal that can work if the community were small enough but it becomes unwieldy when the community becomes larger. However, the principle behind it remains—that the ability to share what we have is founded on the idea that God is Provident. God does not only provide; He provides abundantly as evidenced by Elijah’s encounter with the widow of Zarephath. Furthermore, it also directs our attention to the proper meaning of wealth, that all we possess is never ours. We are merely stewards of God’s providence. As finance chief in my previous parish rightly put it, “Father, money is not yours unless you spend it”. And spent I did.

The notion of common good is based on God’s overarching providence for humanity. Common good suggests that what each of us has is not truly ours. Instead, what we have is part of God’s Providence and we are merely custodians of God’s patrimony. If we blessed with more, some might take it as a measure of wealth, but the truth is, when we are given more, we are actually entrusted with a heavier responsibility. Riches are given not for us to spend in any which way we like even though many of us do but for us to take care of those who for some reasons or other cannot take care of themselves.

I once had a conversation with super intelligent young man, an MIT candidate. Told him that once he has achieved the pinnacle of success to come back and help our country develop. It is true that his skin colour might not be the “kulification” the country cared for. Anyway, point blank he answered me, “No way”. I countered, “Your intelligence is God’s gift to you to be used for a greater purpose, that is, of helping others who are not as gifted as you are”. He response: “That is their problem”.

Riches (or gifts) do not grant the wealthy a divine right to their usage because they are only means to an end. As St Teresa of Avila, quite wisely pointed that out, “Money may be the devil’s excreta, but it is certainly a good fertiliser”. Picture what the Book of Wisdom says: “The mighty shall be mightily put to the test. For the Ruler of all shows no partiality, nor does He fear greatness. Because He Himself made the great as well as the small and provides for all alike but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends” (Wis 6: 6-8). The rich will be judged not by their riches but by how they use it in the service of the Lord.

This changes the landscape of wealth. We generate more not because we want to accumulate but so that more can be shared. Catholicism or Christianity is compatible with wealth and it ties in with the Communion of Saints. According to the Catechism, “Since all the faithful form one body, the good of each is communicated to the others... We must therefore believe that there exists a communion of goods in the Church. As this Church is governed by one and the same Spirit, all the good she has received necessarily become a common fund”. St Augustine spoke of the challenge posed by wealth that people who are rich are sometimes more disgusted by a bad house than by a bad life. What was he saying? It is as if a man’s priority is to have all his possessions good except himself. Wealth is to make us better people—generous, kinder and more loving—but if our possessions turn us selfish, cruel and hateful, then we are better off without them.

To conclude, “I will spend my heaven doing good on earth” is a quote attributed to a spiritual daughter of Teresa of Avila, who is none other than St Therese de Lisieux. Perhaps we could take a leaf from her and tell ourselves that instead of waiting for heaven, we should spend ourselves here on earth doing good for heaven. We do not need to wait for heaven to do good. We do good with what we have in order that we might gain heaven. This means that one ought to, in the generation of wealth, do it in an ethical manner. And in the process, not forget that there are those who might need our help. To do good is beneficial to the soul. Try it and you know what I mean. If only we can build into our ecosystem, a way of allowing the beneficiary of charity to engage in acts of charity themselves—that becomes a way of paying forward. This brings me to the final point: self-preservation.
All of us, without exception, want to live as I pointed out last week. We are not interested in merely existing, we want to live fully and forever. In general, we will do all within our capacity to preserve life and that is a good thing. But along the way, some of us may have forgotten that to live forever, like the grain, we must die to ourselves. The greatest proof of the fullness of life is not holding on to it. It is in the giving that one will receive the fullness of life; it is in the dying that one will live forever. Unless a grain falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain. Remember, a candle is only useful when it is fully burnt. It is useless otherwise.

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

A quote attributed to St Irenaeus says that the glory of God is man fully alive. Today, in the search for life and liberty, to be fully alive is both a goal of existence and a description of meaning. Modernity expresses its reality in terms of meaningfulness. Ever since the advent of the industrial age, man has been largely reduced to merely a cog in a wheel, he is no more than an automaton in the chain of production. Hence, the struggle for meaning takes on an urgency. Meaning is also no longer define by our vocation but more in who we project ourselves to be and how we express that. Now you understand why tattoos are so prevalent these days. This generation speaks of career development. 40 years staying put in one job is almost criminal—a recipe for obsolescence. In other words, we find ourselves caught in a race to re-invent ourselves so that we can be more relevant. Could that be a reason why we love spontaneity? The lack of definition gives us a free hand to remodel ourselves? Ambiguity or vagueness is an aid to adaptation. Let us not be too committed in case we need to change.

In this search for meaning, in desiring to be fully alive, we carry this spontaneity into our faith. To live fully, one should not be so constrained or circumscribed or simply tied down by rules and procedures. Contrast this spontaneity with today’s Gospel. The Jews have 613 laws in the Torah, of which 365 laws consist of prohibition, “Don’t do this”, leaving 248 of them as prescriptions, “Do this”.

Where is the fun?

It is in the context of a highly regulated life that the encounter between Jesus and the scribe took place. It was not an unpleasant exchange between them as often was the case when the path of Jesus crossed that of the scribes and the Pharisees. It was a sincere desire to know if he had been on the right track that occasioned the question of primacy—which commandment was the greatest. Both the first reading and the Gospel make use of the famous Jewish Shema. Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy (Dt 6) commanded the people to love God with their whole mind, their whole heart and their whole strength. Jesus does the same but built into the Shema; He takes a quote from the book of Leviticus (Lev 19) that the love for God should also flow into the love of one’s neighbour. This love of neighbour is the basis for our golden rule, stated positively—you should love your neighbour as yourself and negatively, do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you.

At the heart of the Shema, “Hear, O Israel”, there is practically nothing spontaneous. In fact, the path is distinctly marked out for us because Judaism and Christianity have more or less distilled this wisdom into their religious observances. Practices on which the three pillars of Judaism stand are to pray, to fast and to give alms. These three devout practices enflesh the two commandments in that praying denotes our relationship with God, fasting points to the self, whereas giving alms suggests the social setting within which we move and interact with others.  

The Shema, that is, the call to love God is established on the etymology of the word obey which is audire, meaning to listen. Thus, to listen to God is to obey His commandments. But, in a rush to put ourselves out there, as in to invent ourselves, we might have lost the ability to hear. We are preoccupied with making sure that we are heard that we no longer cultivate a listening ear. Our social climate is characterised by shouting and to be heard, you need to shout the loudest. Where is truth in this? How can we hear God above the din of our making?

Listening and obeying are at the heart of who we truly are. Why? Firstly, we were called into being by God—from nothing to someone—creatio ex nihilo. Secondly, no matter how faint that call is, our faculty of listening and our ability to obey are attuned to God and His commandments because only in God, can we be truly alive. Have you ever heard of someone who wants to be half alive? Only someone who is not in the right frame of mind would aspire to be half alive! The challenge we face is the notion that we can be most alive if we ignore God’s commandments; as if following God’s commandments will constraint us.

Sadly, since we live in a politically correct world, we are preoccupied with socially engineering a world without God, in which people can, by merely willing, learn to be “nice” to each other forgetting that being nice is actually based on the commandments of God and is a gift from God. The equality or the justice that social engineers are hoping to achieve is one which disregard God’s prescription for the world. A good example is the attempt to redefine marriage. Today, if one were to hold on to the traditional or religious notion of marriage, one can be “judged” as cruel or hard-hearted etc. Another example is concept of freedom as unrestrictedly individual. If one were to speak out against abortion, one will be labelled as curtailing the freedom to choose.

God’s commandments do not enslave us. Au contraire, they free us to be who we have been created to be. Spontaneity may give the illusion that it is a nobler kind of love that one can at the spur of the moment do something great. But, what does it mean to love? How does one love? We love by not killing. We love by not stealing. We love by putting others’ needs before our own. We love by sacrificing our life so that others may live. All these so called acts of love are marked by them limits and boundaries and are often expressed in a prohibitive manner.

If obeying God’s commandments leads to fullness of life, then we will often fall short simply because the counter proposals always suggest that we are better off without God and that we will be freer if we listen to the world’s values. In short, we are sinners when it comes to obedience. We fall, time and again. Hence, the second reading speaks of the sacrifices which sinners must pay for their failure which we are in a way fortunate or rather blessed because we have a High Priest who is able to take upon Himself the sins of our failure. His sacrifice enables us to tread the path intended by God for us. In Him, we have the grace to live God’s commandments.

Man is fully alive only when he is alive in God. This takes us right into the very commandments that God gives us. The obedience to God requires praying—without it, our relationship with God stands on shaky grounds. This is confirmed by Jesus, when asked about certain evil that cannot be exorcised, he stated that these can only be defeated by prayer and fasting. Prayer is our phone line to God which we will always need. On top of that need for God, we cannot, without self-denial, conquer our sinful nature. Human nature has been weakened by sin—and it will always seek the easier path or the path of least resistance. The conquest of self gives us a better chance of hearing God and obeying His commands and it is in this relationship with God and through the conquest of self that we find ourselves free to love our neighbours the way Christ loves each one of us. It is this freedom that allows for us to be the saints the Church will want to canonise for the world. This is the true freedom of being alive in God.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

As they say, “The devil is in the detail. The more descriptive an episode is, the more important it is for us to take note. Today, we are given the name of the person healed by Jesus—Bartimaeus. The healing takes place within the final straight for Our Lord as He makes His way from Jericho to Jerusalem, the end of which is most certainly death.

Why is Bartimaeus important to us?

To understand him, we need to go backtrack a little. There are two episodes of blindness that frame this home stretch of Jesus’ life. Just after the revelation that He is the Messiah or the Christ, the first case of blindness presented itself. Jesus healing of the man born blind was done in stages. At first, the blind man saw thing indistinctly—people looked like walking trees—and only after placing His hands over the eye that the blind man began to see clearly. This healing process reflects the understanding of the Disciples. They have come to realise that Jesus is the Messiah but failed to recognise that His leadership involves the sacrifice of His life as a ransom for all. You remember last week, the two brothers aspired to the glory associated with kingship but they have not fully grasped the implication of drinking the chalice of Jesus’ sorrow. In contrast, as a response to faith, Bartimaeus’ healing was straightforward. However, unlike the rich young man’s hesitation, Bartimaeus cast aside his cloak, symbolic of his detachment, to follow Jesus. 

Blindness is definitely more than physical. For most of us, seeing is believing but in the case of Bartimaeus, believing is seeing who Jesus is. As the Little Prince said, ”And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”. In fact, the Gospel readings in the last couple of weeks have all been lined up to help us appreciate the finer details of discipleship—details that are often invisible to the eye. How to be great? It is to be a servant or even to be a slave. How to be first? It is to be last. How to find ourselves? It is to lose ourselves. How to accumulate more? It is to give away more.

These are just some paradoxes that throws a spanner into our status quo. Everywhere we go, we are told that to be the best or to be at top of the pile, you require prestige, you flaunt your wealth or you need sex appeal. Like Bartimaeus, all these shout out at us, drowning our little voice that cries out to God for help.

Indeed, this road to conversion is long and takes time. It would be such a wonderful blessing if we can be like Bartimaeus that the more the world tries to bully us into succumbing to its snares—of lust, power and possession—the more we shout, like Bartimaeus, to God for assistance. But, I think many of us are more like the first man born blind. We can see but not clearly. We know of God but hardly do we know God. We follow Him but almost reluctantly and only to look out for the advantages that comes from following Him.
Whether we know it or not, many of us do buy into Peter’s idea that the Messiahship of Jesus is glory without the Cross. We think of God in terms of prosperity blessing. But, without the Cross it is impossible to understand who Jesus truly is and what it means to follow Him. It is akin spending with a credit card. The pain of payment comes later and even then we can further postpone the pain by transferring our credit balance to another bank. The point is this—we all want the glory without the sacrifice. Hence, just as the Disciples needed to see more clearly, we need to be converted to Calvary before we can reach the summit of the Resurrection.

Why is that hard to be Bartimaeus? One of the most difficult aspects of conversion to discipleship today is telling truth in an age of political correctness. It is with reasons that the current generation is labelled either as snowflake or strawberry—easily bruised and incapable of tough working conditions. They are raised in ways that give them an inflated sense of uniqueness and are therefore entitled. Whether we recognise it or not, the age of entitlement when wrapped with the cloak of victimhood, makes for a lethal combination to faith and its response in discipleship. Now, ever since Adam blamed Eve, society has always needed a safety valve of blame to deal with its imperfection, caused by sin, no doubt. The safety valve is found through blaming and the most convenient targets are those considered less than normal the less than normal—the lame, the blind, the weak or anyone who is abnormal—they are convenient scapegoats for society’s ills. Blame them when things go awry. We do it all the time. There are lot of break-ins in our housing estate. Must be the Indonesians or Banglas.

Christianity changed that when Jesus Himself became the Victim, the one who took upon Himself the sins of the world. His acceptance of the poor, the widow and the orphans drew them into the circle of normal. However, what has happened is that it has become fashionable to be a victim but not for altruistic or noble reasons. Instead, victimhood is worn as a badge of honour that has allowed the victim to victimise other. How? When you have difficulties dealing with a multinational, one of the most effective weapons in your hands is to publish publicly your experience and blame it on any one of “isms”, racism or the racist policies of the multinational and that will often shame the entity to retreat and concession.

The problem with this kind of victimhood is, if something were to go wrong, it is no longer the Cross that we have to bear but rather, someone is to be blamed. Why is God like that? How come I have to suffer? Or blame the parents. I am a killer because my parents did not hug me enough. Furthermore, this ignoble kind of victimhood makes for discomfort if one does not recognise, sympathise, tolerate and finally embrace the cause of solving the victim’s problems. One will be accused of heartlessness. Suckers that we are, we fall easily for the victim underdog. Just look at how Najib is now presented by his daughter, as a man wronged by an ungrateful country. The nation is made to feel guilty for its ingratitude. No one likes to be accused of being ungrateful and definitely, with him being a victim, that is bound to tug a few heart-strings. Poor thing. How can?
I have no beef with Najib but what implication will this debilitating form of victimhood have for discipleship? If we are perpetual victims, always wronged and unjustly treated, what does it mean to follow Christ? All we need is a little suffering and we cave into self-pity. Why? We have been victimised.

Christians are not that kind of self-pitying victims, even though we might be victimised, persecuted, done to or even killed. Instead, the Catholic Mass is locus where, when we offer up the Victim, the only perfect sacrifice acceptable to the Father, each one of us, unite our suffering with Him. His Cross is the only one that makes sense in this world damaged by sin. The Cross makes our sacrifices worthwhile and gives meaning to our discipleship. When Christ redeemed us through His sacrifice on the Cross, He did not come to banish pain and suffering but He transformed them into motives of virtues and occasions of merit so that if we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. The Cross makes it possible to follow Him, like Bartimaeus and later the Eleven, through thick and thin, even when we pay with our lives. As Maximillian Kolbe reminds us, “Let us remember that love lives through sacrifice and is nourished by giving. Without sacrifice there is no love”. Without the Cross, we may languish in victimhood and will be no more than just fair-weathered disciples.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

Apart from hormonal imbalance, why do you think some of us are getting rounder? Or that obesity is increasingly considered a major health issue? One of the reasons could be that the labour expended is inversely proportionate to our food intake. We eat more than what is needed for work. In other words, instead of eating to live, our philosophy, if food blogging were an indication, is living to eat.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying food because consumption belongs to the triple pursuit of happiness. We are socialised into believing that a person’s well-being is heightened by pleasure, accentuated by possession and increased by power. We are all hard-wired to choose behaviours that will increase the secretion of dopamine—the feel good hormone that the more we have of it, the more we crave. When we call someone greedy, it sounds like a dirty word but a person is greedy only because he is seeking more than the usual quota of pleasure that comes from consumption or the accumulation of wealth or the possession of the agency to control people and things. When one is able to control others, there is always a sense of triumph and achievement.

In his Gospel, Mark was rather unflattering in his reporting. In contrast, Matthew would have the mother making the request, placing the “guilt” on the mother. Whereas Mark has the two brothers shamelessly asking the Lord. The others were indignant on account of these two’s brazenness, but one should appreciate the depth of their intuition. Jesus was not the kind of King all decked up in fineries. At His crucifixion, He had only the tunic He wore and here were two brother who seemed to see beyond the physical that they were speaking to Someone more than the ordinary. In a way, they were pretty clued-in in their search for happiness and were not merely greedy for power. Still, sadly though, they equated happiness with greater power.

This happiness we seek is over-rated. Where we have come to believe that happiness is the only measure of our well-being, Jesus turned that upside down. He challenged the two brother, “Really, you think that great power is the answer to life’s happiness? Let me tell you that to serve rather than be served is a surer guarantee of true happiness”.

The path to joy and true happiness is radically counter-intuitive and can be gleaned from the three temptations that Jesus went through. He was tempted to pleasure by turning stones into bread, tempted to possession by the worship of a false god and tempted to power by putting God to the test. Therefore, when a religious priest, brother or sister embraces the three evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty and obedience, he or she does it because the vows are antidotes to the disordered desires for pleasure, possession and power. Chastity stands against a culture that is hedonistic in its pursuit of pleasure by insisting on the principle that pleasure serves a purpose and not otherwise. Our purpose in life is not the fulfilment of pleasures we seek but rather that our pleasure must serve a purpose that is beyond this world. Poverty voluntarily chooses a life of simplicity and detachment contrary to a life of crass accumulation and avaricious possession. Finally, obedience subjugates pride and transforms power into a life service and a willingness to accept suffering even to the point of paying with one’s life. The power of Jesus is shown through His suffering on behalf of and as a ransom for us, poor sinners.

Today is Mission Sunday. Why do we celebrate it? It is one Sunday in a year the Church as a whole comes together in support of mission. We tend to forget that the Church by nature is missionary. Thus, she has a duty to proclaim Christ to the world. However, we inhabit a world aptly described by a French novelist, Gustave Flaubert as “There is no Truth, there is only perception”.  But, we know better because Jesus Himself assured us that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Hence, if we are to be faithful to Christ, our mission is to preach beyond the choir; mission is not limited ad intra because ad extra—a world out there is waiting for the grace of the Gospel.

But who is to bring the Jesus the Truth to them? When James and John jostled for the positions of power, Jesus promised them not exaltation but the certainty of suffering. The missionary endeavour of the Church is steeped in soil saturated with the blood of martyrs who have laid down their live for Jesus Christ and His Church. I have just come back from the Camino Santiago—the same Saint James who asked to sit next to Jesus is also the one who laid down his life for Christ. But, what is at the top of most our minds is probably an unspoken assumption that the mission ad gentes has to do with numbers, that is, mission’s purpose is to increase the size of the Church. The true motivation of our missionary activity is not size but rather to share the joy of knowing Jesus Christ. Sometimes that may end with the shedding of blood.

But, we are afraid of losing our lives and in a country as diverse as this, we naturally favour dialogue because it appears to be an easier option. However, inter-religious dialogue is no substitute for mission. It would be foolish to think that in the interest of harmony coupled with the fear of upsetting people, we should tone down what we consider to be true because faith to be credible must be founded on truth. Otherwise, why believe? The faculty of believing is such that it believes in the truth (even if what it believes in is false). Journalists are supposedly witnesses to truth because they are always on a mission to uncover the truth for without truth, everything becomes uncertain. And, sanity does not fare well in uncertainty. Our stock-market is the best exemplar of this human fear of uncertainty. As soon as there is ambiguity, the market turns jittery. But, if there is truth, it is also of human nature to shout it out. Have you ever heard of a researcher who after a scientific discovery keeps quiet about it? No, in fact, he will do his very best to make sure that the world knows of his discovery.

Believing is always of the Truth and the Truth must make itself known. This is why the Church is missionary by nature. As Benedict XVI said, “Some religions, particularly ‘tribal religions’ are waiting for the encounter with Jesus Christ but the encounter is always reciprocal. Christ is also waiting for their history, their wisdom, their vision of the things. We proclaim Jesus Christ not to procure as many members as possible for our community, and still less in order to gain power. We speak of Him because we feel the duty to transmit that joy which has been given to us." In that case, Pope Francis was right. His first encyclical was called “Evangelium gaudium”—the Joy of the Gospel. St Teresa used to pray, “Lord, save us from dour-looking saints” and so, our first step to credibility is to make sure that we walk out into the world radiating the joy that comes from believing in Jesus Christ. It does not mean that when we believe, everything will be fine—everything will be hunky dory as they say but that in spite of everything that afflicts us, nothing can take away the certainty and joy we have that Jesus is the only Way, the Truth and the Life.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

The theme for this Sunday’s Mass is the Eucharist as the Bread of Life. In saying so, we might have missed out a component without which the Eucharist can never be the Bread of Eternal Life. This is not Good Shepherd Sunday but it might as well be because the Gospel appears to lend itself to thinking about the priesthood and vocation. In general, this is a vocation losing its appeal as the priesthood is held up in contempt simply because of the sins of some us. 

If this can be described as re-branding, I assure you it is not. It is, if at all, to re-vision what it means to be a priest, why it is necessary that we have the priesthood and what goes into the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

As Church, we cannot run away from what is happening in the world because the Church and the world do not inhabit different spaces but are in fact sharing the same space. What we find in the world and perhaps detest, we find it in the Church as well. How many of you follow the Britain’s Got Talent franchise? America’s Got Talent, India’s Got Talent, Asia’s Got Talent. Hell, even Tg Pengerang’s Got Talent. Under a diversity and non-discriminatory narrative, there is a strong belief that such talent hunting is truly an exercise of democratic equalisation? Under the rule of the common, it is believed that everyone can be talented, or have access to showcase it. If you watched Ratatouille, you would know that everyone can cook. Talent scouting has uncovered some hitherto hidden talents—Susan Boyle for example? But behind this noble quest hides an insatiable chase for celebrity status. Celebrity is, as Hugh Jackman sings in the Greatest Showman, “... for years and years, I chased their cheers, the crazy speed of always needing more...”  And the step-sister of celebrity status is the personality cult. In a rugged-identity era, what are these but the search for individuality. Is the cult of personality not a reason for our fascination with the talents of our priests? Father X can sing like Josh Groban. Father Y can cook and curse like Gordon Ramsay. Fr Z can dance like Michael Jackson.

We want our priests to have pizzaz... holy pizzaz, hopefully. But what was a genius of the Tridentine Mass, the missa ad orientem, a Mass disparagingly described as priest with his backside to the people? Firstly, the missa versus populus which has been described to be more people-friendly has the disrespectful corollary in that it is 100% all right for the priest to show his backside to God. If it is not alright to show my backside to you, it is definitely alright to show it to God? Secondly, the priest weighed down by the heavy vestments finds his so-called personality in a manner of speaking shrouded in order than the faithful may perceive that truly Jesus Christ is present in the alter Christus and the only duty worth the priest’s salt is to do the one thing which Christ depends on him to and no one in the congregation can do—confect the Blessed Sacrament. No one in the crowd unless one is a priest. The bulkiness of the vestments is not because we like flowing robes. It is so that the personality of the priest might disappear under the vestments in order that Christ may become visible—He must increase, I must decrease.

Is that important? Through the fallible instrument of the priest, Christ gives us Himself so that we may avail of His strength to continue the work of salvation. St Paul in the 2nd Reading speaks of changing the world. Be the change you want the world to be. Redeem the world and in order that the work of redemption started by Christ can continue, we need the Eucharist and this mission cannot be done without the Catholic priesthood. 

Hence, either God is stupid or we are missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is how can Jesus insist on the necessity of the Eucharist if He cannot find a way to provide it? If there are no vocations, it is not because God has stopped calling. We may have stopped listening.

The priesthood is not a club of the meritorious. It is not a reward of those who are saved. In the early 70s, the Society of Jesus asked this question “Who is a Jesuit”? The answer given was “A Jesuit is a sinner, yet called by God”. A Jesuit is a sinner because many a Jesuit come from broken families and chances are, people who are from broken families can be manipulative or sick. Is it any surprise that those who hold our trust fall prey to sin? Yes, one should expect that those who are in charge of the kitty do not steal. But Judas did and there have been Judases all through the centuries. In the same manner, we do not pick our priests from the tree of purity. A priest is definitely not your saviour, only Jesus is. But, despite the priest being a sinner, he stands alter Christus, as another Christ, so that ex opere operato, he can confect the Eucharist. 

Does the priesthood then need purification? Yes, it does. But so does society at large. If you want good priests, widen and deepen the pool of good families. But, for now, we need to understand that without the priesthood, there is no Eucharist, without the Eucharist, there is no Church. Without the Church, there is no salvation. That is ex opere operato.

A little clarification is needed. There is no guarantee that good family equates to good priests. The general rule we follow is that a good tree produces good fruits. Thus, the portraits of many of our priest are also testimonies of God’s grace. He takes the weak and make them strong to bear witness to Him.

Nevertheless, judging from sad state we are in, the Devil is laughing all the way down in hell because the destruction of the priesthood falls within his nefarious plans against God and humanity. Whilst there should be vigilance against clerical abuse—of all kinds—financial, sexual and even liturgical, we must be on guard not to sin against the priesthood. Not in the sense that priests should be put up for adulation, but rather in the sense that we must not lose faith in the necessity of the priesthood for the salvation of souls.

The best priest is not one who can cook or sing or dance or even do “great things”. The best priest is one who knows how to provide the sacraments when needed—especially the forgiveness of sins and the confection of the Eucharist. He is at his best when performing these actions because his priestly anointing sets him apart for this sublime duty—to make Christ present through the sacraments, especially through the Sacrament of sacraments—the Eucharist. For after all is said and done, when all scandals are exposed as they should be, when every wound is healed but the end result is that the laity has lost faith in the priesthood of Christ, the question to ask is, what is to become of the Body of Christ? I ask this question not to stifle whatever that needs to be done. (This might have been the same question asked by those who covered up the abuses, which explained the culture of silence). 

I ask it because in seeking to reform the culture associated with our priesthood, we need to recognise that priests are not plucked from the tree of perfect families. It calls for a conversion of the whole culture that provides for vocation. For example, the more divorces we have, chances are the more broken the priesthood will be. Ex opere operato, we will get the Eucharist even though it is celebrated by the most sinful priest because the priest is merely an instrument and it is Jesus Christ Himself who guarantees the “reality” of the sacrament. But ex opere operantis, we will have a credibility deficit—whereby faith is challenged not so much by the message but rather by the medium, that is, the Eucharist may be real but the priest who confects it makes it hard for people to believe that Christ can be present at all. In short, without a reform of family life and our culture, we will have shot ourselves in the foot!

The Church needs more holy priests. It must begin with holy families.

  

Assumption of Mary 2018

What is so important about the Assumption of Mary? What significance is there to this celebration?

Mary is both our strength and in an ignorant world, she is perceived to be our weakness. Before you conclude that I have committed a grave sin, let me clarify. Firstly, she definitely is our strength because of she is the Mother of God. Secondly, she is perceived to be our weakness because some ignorant Protestants believe that we worship her. The fact that this so-called dogma was proclaimed in 1950 might just lend itself to this perception. One cannot be further from truth when one holds this position.

Catholics hold her to be their strength, as mentioned earlier, not only because she is the Mother of God but because of who we are. Why? In a perfect paradise, in our prelapsarian innocence, humanity would be endowed with the preternatural gifts of integrity meaning that both our body and soul were united. But in our postlapsarian perdition, in our fallen state, there arose the discrepancy which St Paul so aptly described to the Romans, “For I do not do the good that I want to do. But the evil that I hate is what I do”.

This is our present state: We all struggle. But, somehow, in a self-help, positive-thinking, self-made environment, we seemed have banished the word “struggle” from our spiritual vocabulary. After all, like the Bionic Man, we can, if we think positively, help or reinvent ourselves. A line from the Salve Regina draws us back to our mundane morass—ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle—To thee do we send forth our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

Now, the two major Marian celebrations are in a sense holistic or integral in the treatment of the human person. In the Immaculate Conception, the feast touches on the human soul whereas today, the Assumption addresses the body that we have.

There is a war within us, a battle between good and evil which is waged daily in this lacrimarum valle. We like to think of ourselves as disciples but when we speak of discipleship, what is implied is discipline. In order to excel in a specialty or branch of knowledge, discipline is what we most need but it is also the least that we want. Ask any PhD candidate about what it means to write a thesis. Distraction, laziness and procrastination—all these are indications of a lack of discipline. But, it runs on logic that nobody likes “punishment” unless he is a masochist, that is, someone who enjoys punishment. True? And yet, when we want a beautiful body, it takes a lot of discipline and the funny thing is some are willing to pay that price for a perfect body to die in, but to follow the Lord closely it is another ball game altogether.

You see that the aim of the Assumption is not to promote a healthy body per se but to remind us that the body is part and parcel of the work of salvation brought about by Christ. When we die, even though the body may suffer corruption, at the Resurrection, our bodies will be reunited with our soul. Therein, the Catholic prohibition of scattering one’s ashes/“cremains” as if one were a free-spirited soul.

Two prefaces can be placed side by side. The Assumption and the Ascension. Part of the Assumption’s Preface reads like this:

For today the Virgin Mother of God

was assumed into heaven

as the beginning and image

of your Church’s coming to perfection

and a sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people.

This imagery draws its inspiration from the Preface of the Ascension which sounds goes like this: 

For the Lord Jesus, the King of glory,

conqueror of sin and death,

ascended to the highest heavens, ...

... he ascended, not to distance himself from our lowly state

but that we, his members, might be confident of following

where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before.

The discipline we endure in this life is in order that we may follow our Head and Founder and Mary being the foremost of Christ’s disciples is assumed into heaven because she alone is the one perfect dedication—body and soul—to her Lord and Saviour. There, she, who is everything like us except by the grace of God preserved from sin, becomes the beacon for those of us who are struggling in this valley of tears, hoping one day to follow. As a fellow pilgrim, this Mother of ours is certainly the most powerful advocate and also the greatest help we can ever have in our journey. As Lumen gentium gently reminds: Mary is now in a position to exercise fully her "motherhood in the order of grace," without interruption until the eternal fulfilment of all the elect (LG 62).

Finally, these days, people have been lamenting about the unusually warm weather that has resulted in many illnesses. If you feel that the heat is intolerable and your sickness uncomfortable, Assumption is truly a great reminder. Why? Hell or eternal damnation is not even an iota close to a trillion times worse. In fact, whatever we suffer now will be infinitely and infernally multiplied in hell. Hence, Assumption serves as a reminder to desire that which is boundlessly pleasing and joyful. Therefore, to Mary who is in heaven, we entrust the care of our souls and ask that despite our weaknesses, she never gives up on succouring us so that one day, bruised or battered, we may knock on heaven’s door and there, our Lord will open it for us and welcome us into the Kingdom which He has won by His life, death and resurrection.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2018

Last week, I spoke of a vague rejection of the Resurrection. Here is another example of how unwittingly we do it. Since we live so close to our neighbour down south, some of us might tune in to their radio stations. [For me, it’s Class 95]. One of the things which they are trying to raise awareness of is pre-diabetes and we are told that it a condition which is reversible. The attempt to prevent the onslaught of this condition—Alzheimers/Parkinsons or that disease—cancer/AIDS is similar to what takes place at funerals—that is, we like to assign a cause for one’s death. "His son died from a car accident" or "her mother died from cancer". "Their father died from second-hand smoke of their chain-smoking mother". The fact is, with or without a condition or disease, everyone will die sooner or later. No matter how much we try to prevent it, death ultimately will claim us.

This week, our topic continues along the line of food and eating. It is ironical that we want to stave off death, that is, in yearning for earthly immortality, we are eating ourselves to death. The curse of a developed and developing nation is an insatiable appetite to eat and not just that, to eat more than we should. It is conceivable that our taste-buds have become jaded from over eating, hence our foods have to be super-flavourful—added sugar, added fat, added herb and spices, added salt and on top of that everything is supersized.

Today, in the interest of living longer and healthier but not in an effort to avoid death or an expression of a disbelief in the Resurrection, the first reading might just teach us how to avoid diabetes.

Elijah is on the run. He had managed to dis the prophets of Baal and Queen Jezebel was hounding him. To have done good and be punished for it, even the stoutest amongst us may just give in to discouragement and depression. He sits under a furze or gorse bush desiring to die. But the angel, woke up and told him to eat. Perhaps you realise why many of us are predisposed to pre-diabetes. We do not need angels to remind us that food can lift us out of our depression. Carbohydrates work wonders as a comfort food. But, instead of eating for strength, food has become the drug of the depressed.

In that case, how to avoid diabetes?

The French have two words which might help us make a transition—from comfort food to food for the journey. They are gourmand and gourmet. Both words are related to food. The former describes a person who is excessively fond of eating and drinking whereas the latter describes one who is a connoisseur of good food and drink. In other words, a gourmet is one who cultivates a discriminating palate whilst enjoying the finer things in life. Like Remy the rat in Ratatouille. All this relatives and friends are gourmands because they go for quantity unlike Remy who says that his mouth is made for better things. 

Now, just because one likes the finer things in life, they do not automatically elevate a person to the status of a gourmet. Najib and his wife (if Shafie were here, he would assert that Najib is being publicly tried in a homily) could be fine illustrations of how one can appreciate the finer things in life and yet be gourmands. Many may not see it this way but like over-eating, one can also accumulate to death.

Today Jesus continues to invite his Jewish listeners to a discerning recognition for what is truly the food for heaven. Sadly, their response was biblically predictable. How? Like their ancestors, they started murmuring—a reaction which betrays not an absence of refinement but rather of a lack of trust.

Why would Jesus want to introduce the people to this fine form of food? St Thomas in the commentary on Book IV of the Sentences gives us the perfect clue. He says, “Material food first changes into the one who eats it, and then, as a consequence, restores to him lost strength and increases his vitality. Spiritual food, on the other hand, changes the person who eats it into itself. Thus the effect proper to this Sacrament is the conversion of a man into Christ, so that he may no longer live, but Christ lives in him; consequently, it has the double effect of restoring the spiritual strength he had lost by his sins and defects, and of increasing the strength of his virtues”. St. Thomas, Commentary on Book IV of the Sentences, d. 12, q. 2, a. 11.

In short, we become what we eat. Stand next to a man who consumes all the floating bulbs of garlic in your pot of Bak Kut Teh and the following morning you will be standing next to a garlic garden. They say that food is cheap in the USA—usually the bad ones are—and thus you have lots of obese people because they resemble the greasy burgers and fries they consume.

The Jews certainly did not understand that the food that Jesus gives was for an eternal purpose. We eat so that we can become whom we have eaten. We eat the Body of Christ so that we can truly transform into the Body of Christ. I like Corpus Christi but it can be a harrowing experience for us living in a country unaccustomed to the deep symbolism of the procession. It definitely is an inconvenience to those who do not believe as we jam up the road and block traffic. Only that, we look ridiculous at best and idolatrous at worst. But, therein a most sublime symbolism—the Body of Christ, the Church, carrying the real Body of Christ. We want to become Him who became one of us.

St Paul in the 2nd Reading in detailing how members of a community should behave with each other is actually describing what sort of relationships that should exist within the Body of Christ. Within that community, members find their relationships enriched because of their conversion in Jesus Christ. To be more like Jesus, we need to consume Him more. But never in the gourmand sense that one receives communion in as many Masses they are in town.

In summary, our appreciation of the finer things in life begins with an acknowledgement that the Eucharist is tied up with the Resurrection for the Resurrection would be meaningless without and vice versa. The less we believe in the Resurrection, the less will we honour the Blessed Sacrament. But, the Resurrection is not a far off event somewhere beyond the pale. Instead, the belief in it begins now in the concrete—in the who we are and how we behave—as the Body of Christ, but it does not end here and for that, we need the Bread of Life to accompany us as the Viaticum, giving us strength, slowly, surely, changing us so that what we have begun here, will culminate in the eternity we wish to spend in His presence. St Ignatius of Antioch may have called the Eucharist the medicine of immortality and antidote of death—and so for us, to paraphrase Buzz Lightyear, the Eucharist is the real and only food we need for this long journey to infinity and beyond.