I once bought the car I desired on a balloon scheme. This scheme allowed me an affordable, much smaller monthly instalment until the final month of the loan term when I had to pay a hefty lump sum. Distracted by the prize, I postponed the worry about the price. I gleefully drove off in a brand new car.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field”.

There are a few people, too few, who fulfil this. They generously give up a life for themselves to take up a life in service for God. These are our priests and religious who have sold everything to buy the field. For the rest of us we remain outside the monastery walls very likely not even wanting to look in until we have some sort of a conversion experience.

The difference about this treasure hidden in the field is that God really want us to find it. The Holy Spirit works constantly and tirelessly in our lives to bring us an experience of God in our personal lives. He look to deliver a boost, to bring about that convincing moment in our heart when wisdom crystallise for us to want to trade our life for a new life in Christ. When we have a conversion experience, we are willing to sell everything to buy the field.

The reality of life is that this isn’t quite so easy to transact. A lot of what we have to sell is entangled in our vocation and relationships. We are not quite ready to drop our nets while our children are still at school or when we need income to care for our aging parents. Responsibilities, not greed at all, dictate that we must continue to trade outside the monastery walls, in the market place of the secular world. Much as we like to, we cannot immediately buy the field. And so we think.

Spiritual conversion takes place in our heart. It is in the heart where the transaction to sell everything to buy the field takes place. We will all continue with our life vocation as parent and child but a conversion in the heart simply mean to place God in the centre of the field with our life revolving and evolving around him.

Life will begin to spiritually evolve when our desires for earthly things are lessened. The Spirit will work to loosen our hands gripping fearfully on the wheel of a new car thinking that it will bring us happiness. Like the balloon scheme we are asked to convert our lives little by little in small instalments until we are ready to pay a bigger lump sum to live a new and fuller life in faith. This is God’s patience and generosity for us.

We have time for “the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea that brings in a haul of all kinds. When it is full, the fishermen haul it ashore; then, sitting down, they collect the good ones in a basket and throw away those that are no use. This is how it will be at the end of time”. But we really do not know how much time we have. Sell, and buy the field before the balloon burst.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field”.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Good and bad. Wheat and weed. Life sustaining and life destroying. They co-exist until the end of our earthly life when the harvest arrives. “The harvest is the end of the world”, or the end of our time here. Then a permanent divide will separate for eternity, good from bad. Which side will we end up?

Along the way of our earthly journey, the sower who sowed us in his field will nurture our growth and protect us from harm. He will guard his wheat from the weeds. “There is no God other than you who cares for everything”. In other words, however complicated things get in life for us, we must know and believe that God is in everything, even the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant event of our day.

So bad things can, and will, happen to us in life. This is not God’s doing but the consequence of the weeds in our life. God only allowed co-existence and that day will come when he doesn’t. If that day is today, will all of us make it to the good side? So, he has “remained mild in judgement and govern us with great lenience”. And has kindly given us a lifetime to make sure we get onto the good side.

We are never left alone each day in our lifetime. Little seeds fall into our life every day. Most of them so small, they are unnoticed. Often they appear in small gestures of kindness or comforting and encouraging words from people around us. Often too the details are so tiny that we cannot yet see any link to what is happening and our limited human mind brush them away as ‘coincidences’.

The good news is that there are no coincidences in life. God cares for everything. He works every day, actually every moment, to untangle us wheat from the choking effect of the darnel. He is ahead of us on our earthly journey and somewhere further up the road, we will find repairs to our hurt and ‘coincidences’ as the work of the Divine; tiny little patterns, intricate in details sewed together in the Sower’s time into a beautiful tapestry that is our personal life on earth.

In the words of a friend, who encountered a little act of kindness this week from a stranger, shared, “Hold on to the little things with mustard seed faith, take heart that the smallest gestures can also move mountains”.

Seeds become wheat which become flour. Mustard seeds become big trees of shelter. The journey of our earthly life is this process. We are good seeds sown by the Sower into this world to become good people. First we make sure that we remain as wheat and then collectively as a wheat field fight off the harming effect of the darnel to become flour to make bread.

The world is a wheat field, its produce is life sustaining bread. A little bit of yeast will help three measures of flour rise to become the bread of life. We are sharers of this bread. Little gestures from strangers are like yeast to our faith life. We are called to be this stranger to others, to be the yeast in their loaf. Yes, please!

The best yeast: “how the virtuous man must be kindly to his fellow men”.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The mind receives, the heart gives. The Word of God comes to us in the form of teachings and doctrines. It falls like a seed into us. This seed must make its journey from the head to the heart. Because it is from the heart and not the mind that love flows. Teachings and doctrines must not remain merely as head knowledge but must be made to come alive through our actions.

“As the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do.”

We are meant to be sowers of love. As the rain waters the earth to make it rich, knowledge nourishes us with understanding. As rain water seeps its way into the earth to find life, the Word of God must make its way into our heart to give life.

But this journey for the seed is a challenging one. Within us, our experiences in life have shaped our emotions, feelings, thoughts, decisions and actions. These have made us who we are. They have formed the landscape along the path from our head to our heart.

Perhaps we relate best to the seed that fell among thorns for we care too much for our worldly needs, choking and distancing us from a life of faith. Part of this path are also like patches of rock when experiences have led us into cynicism or bitterness and un-forgiveness preventing the Word of God from taking root in us.

However, knowledge is a double edged sword. It can also make us proud and arrogant. “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom without understanding, the evil comes and carries off what was sown in his heart.” This “understanding” is this necessity for this knowledge to be coupled with action. We cannot teach or preach when our actions do not testify of this love. Without actions of love, it will only be our pride speaking and often the contraction cuts like a sword.

We live in an over-informed time. Obedience to faith was easy in the yesteryears when life was less complicated and our minds less crowded. Today, overcoming our challenges to faith cannot only be an intellectual battle. Debating on knowledge alone will only leave us in a stalemate.

We are called to sow in this battlefield. Catechism alone will be like roots that quickly dry up in the scorching sun if we fail to bring alive this knowledge through love. And love is action that originate from our heart. Our heart is rich soil, and the seed of love must reach it. Only then can our life “yield a harvest that produces now a hundredfold”.

As love rain down from heaven into our life, watering it and making it grow, our life will yield a harvest, so when our journey is complete we return to our Maker, not empty, but succeeding in carrying out what our life was sent to do: Sow Love.

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

We cannot rest and we can’t find that rest. Life today has an uncontrollable momentum. We are in pursuit, chasing happiness and contentment. We want more of what we already have, and we persistently try to up our living standards. Occasionally riding on the crest of success, we find gratification. Then soon enough we realise we are not at rest. We rev up again.

Life has gone onto the bully fast track especially in more affluent cities. We are held at ransom for even our basic needs. If we are not up to speed to join the chase, it is conceivable that we are without a job, the currency needed to fund our earthly existence. Joining the race is not an option, the world has bullied us into it.

It is an arduous race. God knows that this earthly journey of ours will leave us laboured and overburdened. He does not say to quit the race but instead offer to accompany us running it.

“Come”. In the madness of this world He is there. In our frenetic daily life, God is too slow for us. Things need to be done and His ways are either irrelevant or will peg us back. When we rest, we drink the juice of self-gratification. But we eventually find that we cannot quench our thirst. Yet he says, “Come”.

Bread will turn into stone. Our enthusiastic eager pursuit of worldly happiness will turn laborious and become a burden. We will eventually discover that the rest we gained is no rest at all. Not for who we are.

We are created beings. Created by the one God, and of that spiritual nature the readings says, “Your interests are not in the unspiritual, since the Spirit of God has made his home in you … so then … there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives”.

To try to live in this world and to do our best in it is in itself not unspiritual. We only become unspiritual when we choose to cut out the way of God and adopt the way of the world as our only way. Both ways exist but the way of the world must be within the way of God.

He is present in the frenzy of daily life. He is there in every setback we encounter beckoning us to “come”. Even if we have drifted so far away, his call to “come” echoes in the emptiness of our faith life. Actually he already knows that we are quite far away otherwise why does he need to beckon us to “come”?

The world will cruelly make us an underdog. But he is humble and meek. While we pedal in meekness in the fast and powerful lanes of life we find solace in his invitation today. “Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest”. The rest he wants to give is true rest; peace that only he can give, one which the world cannot as it continues to zoom by. So come … deposit your burden and “you will find rest for your souls”.

While we pedal in meekness in the fast and powerful lanes of life we find solace in his invitation today. “Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest”.

14th Sunday Ordinary Time

This is real conflict. There is this constant, nagging call to serve God and to give more time to the Church. Often we turn a deaf ear. Because there is so much that needs achieving in career and family life. Young adults are conflicted if they should give the best years of their life away instead of travelling the world, building up on material comforts and tasting the sweetness of this worldly life.

What is life’s end game? What is our belief? Is happiness found in a barn full of accumulated wealth? Or do we accept today’s second reading that “when we were baptized in Christ Jesus we were baptized in his death, so we too might live a new life”. For most of us we would inquire about the possibility of having both and this becomes a simmering tension of our everyday life.

With God there isn’t a conflict. He wants true happiness for every one of us. Yes even happiness of this world, happiness in daily life. He shows us the way, “Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow my footsteps is not worthy of me”. Oh, quite the opposite of what I desire.

Taking up our cross is not always choosing the worst option in daily life. It is about making every decision with God in the equation, and ultimately if the decision follows the law of love. This is the mind-set that put us on the path to serving God that will eventually see us shift our desires to place God in the centre of life.

We are conflicted when we want to buy a new car because the fervent community tells us it is better to give the money to the needy. We feel guilty when we pursue the best schools for our children and when we participate in the rat race. This is good mental tension because for starters we are mindful to the presence of God and we are trying to focus on Him as well.

We must be like the old couple in today’s reading; eagerly welcoming the presence of God in our life. “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me; and those who welcome me welcomes the one who sent me”. Everything we do in this life must firstly be for his sake, yes even in our pursuit of career and family. But we must start by welcoming God into all the compartments of our life so that gradually our lives will transform as we find ourselves “taking up the cross” more often to serve him.

I can drive a new car and come from the best school but it is not the possession nor the status but how I can use them to serve God amongst the people I encounter daily. Gradually with God’s growing presence we will find ourselves taking up the cross more often and we will be shaped and transformed as we follow his footsteps. Slowly but surely the desires of what is worldly gives way to what is Godly. When our experience of God’s glory increases, our desire for self-gratification decreases. A new car will eventually become less important.

This is part of the dynamics of our faith journey. We will fall in love with this cross we carry because it gives so much back to us by allowing us to experience what joy and true happiness really are. It takes time and we must not turn a deaf ear but instead begin to welcome God and put him in the centre of our decisions. Conflicts and tensions will evaporate when we are graced to this wisdom, “Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Conflict – Do I buy a new car or carry the cross?

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time