The ministry that I belong to use to operate a “$1 canteen” once a year after Sunday morning masses where every delicious food item was sold for a king’s ransom of only one dollar. Almost every item was sold below the cost of making or obtaining them. We did brisk business at a loss.

An elderly be-spectacled gentleman well into his 70’s helped along in the supporting arms of his wife shuffled up to us needing to say these words, touchingly mumbled “Thank you sir for selling at a dollar for otherwise my wife and I would not afford to eat such good food”.

That night as we laid in bed this passage flashed across our minds, “For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome”. “Lord” we asked, “When did we see you hungry and feed you?” At that moment the face of that elderly gentleman appeared. “You saw me in the canteen”.

We are no saints. We had argued over the logic of it all. We could not reconcile selling our homemade food items at such a low price after all we used quality ingredients. We struggled when we saw seemingly rich people take advantage of the $1 price by taking away larger quantities. But by the end of the morning many people came up to express appreciation, gratitude and happiness. And we in return felt joy, fulfilment and satisfaction.

We learned a valuable lesson that morning. The success of a Sunday canteen is never measured by how much money we make but by how much happiness it brought to people by an act of pure, unconditional, non-judgmental giving. Rich or poor, people will always be touched by kindness. Rich or poor, kindness from God is available to all.

“I myself will pasture my sheep, I myself will show them where to rest – it is the Lord who speaks. I will look for the lost one, bring back the stray, bandaged the wounded and make the weak strong. I shall watch over the fat and the healthy. I shall be a true shepherd to them.”

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King. His is a kingdom established on kindness – a kingdom established for all people without judgement. This was a King who ransomed his life for all of us without a price.

As subjects in his kingdom we can always see the face of our King and be in his company through kind acts especially to strangers. “I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of this brothers of mine, you did it to me.”

We saw in the face of the be-spectacled elderly gentleman the face of our King. No doubt he too saw the same face of the King in our faces. The King was present in the canteen. No wonder we felt joy, fulfilment and satisfaction.

We would both have missed that encounter if we had charge more than $1 for food.

The Solemnity of Christ the King

We were all born with some raw talent. We could not have chosen the type and number of talents. These are all gifts from God. We use these talents and develop abilities. We invest time and effort into these abilities. For some of us our abilities acquired for us professional skills.

“For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

This is part of today’s Gospel passage. Ironically from a secular viewpoint we understand this better. We continue to make use of our talents and our professional skills to accumulate more for ourselves and our families. We leverage on what we have and who we are. The more we have, the more we can attain. We start to build our own kingdom of comfort.

But what about the Church we belong to? Who will serve in the parish ministries? Who will build the kingdom of heaven? Often we excuse ourselves because we do not have the required skill set to do church work or simply we are too busy with our secular life. But the Church does not require all of us in our professional capacities. God gave each of us some talent when we were born. It is that person God calls, not the professional we have become. Neither is he calling us to quit our secular vocations.

To build the kingdom of heaven in the secular world calls for the use of the same raw talents we have and used to build our secular life. The Church is not calling us as accountants, lawyers or doctors but call for us to use the talents that made us into accountants, lawyers and doctors. These are talents in stewardship, leadership, organization, man-management, public speaking, personality, salesmanship, public relations, artistic talents and a host of so many other raw talents. These are what God want from us to use to build his kingdom on earth.

We can do this while we fulfil all our earthly vocations. God is not taking away what we have achieved in life through the use of the talents he gifted us. He is telling us that there is a dual purpose for the talents we are blessed with. These same talents that we have developed to bring us thus far in our secular life, he ask that we trade them to bring the kingdom of heaven along.

We have talents to build friendships. These he ask to build communities. We have talents to contribute to companies. These he ask to contribute to parish ministries. We use our talents to build our own little kingdoms. These he ask to build the kingdom of heaven. It is not so much to give up one for the other but to realize the dual purpose of our gifted talents.

When we realise about this dual purpose to our talent then the purpose for the kingdom of heaven must not be buried and hidden. We must unbury it and use it without fear for we will not lose anything by using it for his kingdom. For everyone who has will be given more.

A magician is born with raw talent which he uses to acquire his professional skill. God calls him to remain a magician but God also calls for his talent to be used to build his kingdom. (Photo: Declan Tan, magician)

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Five of them were foolish and five were sensible: the foolish ones did take their lamps, but they brought no oil, whereas the sensible ones took flasks of oil as well as their lamps.”

We can at times be incredibly dim. Amidst every uncertainty in life, there is but one certainty which is that we will all die. One of those uncertainties is that we do not know the hour when death comes calling. Yet we can remain incredibly complacent in our preparations for this eventuality.

“So stay awake for you do not know the day or the hour”

Life can offer us a lot of comforts. Some of us are blessed with a good life; material comforts and happy relationships. So much so that we can afford the luxury of debating how much control we want to hand over to God, how much do we want to live our life according to his blueprint, his wisdom of living in spiritual poverty of being entirely dependent on him. In our comforts we can become spiritually complacent and put God aside as we do not feel a strong need for him.

God remains generous and will continue to pour blessings in our life. Who we are today is due to his generosity. What he has given, he will not take back. That comes only when death opens the door for us to meet him. We need then to be accountable for how we have used all his blessings. The same set of talent we used to climb corporate ladders and build wealth are also talents that can be effectively used to climb the stairway to heaven and build his kingdom here.

We all have a lamp. It is to prepare us for entering the kingdom of heaven for eternity. When the hour cometh for us it must be lighted. This light is the presence of God in our life, the centralization of the Gospel in our values. The oil we use to keep the lamp burning is the lifestyle we embrace. The more we give of ourselves, the more we surrender to the will of God to love our neighbor, the more detached we are from the things of this world, the more the oil is topped up in our flasks.

It is not a contradiction of generosity and selflessness when the five sensible bridesmaids did not want to share their oil with the other five foolish bridesmaids who did not have oil. Much as they may have wanted to, they could not. This oil is the life we have lived with God present in everything we did. Only “I, myself” can produce my own oil to keep my own lamp burning.

We can allow the culture of materialism to shape and decorate our lamps. I don’t think God begrudges us that. We can live a materially comfortable lifestyle, if we are so blessed, but it cannot be devoid of a desire for God that must be reflected in our lifestyle to care beyond ‘self’ and to build his kingdom. “For you my soul is thirsting, O God my God”. This life with its oil must be in our lamp.

“Wisdom is bright, it does not grow dim”. Give me oil in my lamp, keep it burning till the end of day. We may need to wise up.

A life lit up by the presence of God, central in our daily life (Photo: Cappellania Italiana, Salesian Convent, Bangkok)

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Since they do not practise what they preached”

New technologies, the digital world, the internet, social media have turn up like a train arriving too quickly barging into our once simpler lifestyle. For better or for worse, it has changed our world. For sure, it has altered our train of thought and changed our decision making process. Specifically today, it has influenced how we live the faith we profess.

Secularisation for a long time have also been arriving on another track accelerated now by the digital speed we are blessed with today. As we speed into modernisation, we are told that it is better to leave behind our traditional religious beliefs. Coupled together it threatens to derail our faith life.

It is recommended that we separate our faith life from our worldly life. Secularisation plus our altered thought process and a new average speed of our lifestyle have together widened the gap between our worldly life and our faith life. However we know that these two worlds are actually one and inseparable. And that our one world must be guided by our traditional religious beliefs.

This does not mean traditional methods. Methods we must alter to address the changed world. The new evangelisation seeks to address this widening gap. It encourages a new ardour, a new method and a new expression to continue to uphold the same constant message of all religious beliefs. And this traditional message is to live our worldly life with love and through love. Love is the tradition of our religious belief and this train must chug along uninterrupted.

When we were simpler, we simply accepted our belief. We expressed our religious beliefs in rituals steeped in tradition. We lived by the law of love. Preaching and teaching then was very sufficient. There were few alternatives until the trains of modernity started arriving hemming in our faith life into a narrow corridor choking life from it.

We started to question faith, searching for answers. Many of us fell into the widened gap, confused by the pull of both worlds leaving us lost in between.

Preaching is no longer sufficient. It is no longer enough to bridge the gap. The modern mind has too many questions and at the same time has too much information or misinformation readily available in the digital world. It struggles to crystalize everything coming at speed and is confused that living a faith life is having to live in tradition that modernity with all its promises of happiness will leave behind.

Today we must heed the call to practise what is being preached, more so than ever before. Love in firstly an experience; teaching and preaching love without facilitating an experience of love is utterly hopeless. It is only when we experience love real in our life will we experience the truth of the need for our faith to be prominent in our worldly ways. Practice fulfils the preaching.

The train of the new evangelisation has also arrived. On it is the call for a new method for love to be interactive in this digital age. Tradition and modernity will go hand in hand only if rooted in the practise of love for the other person. Practising love, not merely preaching, keeps us on track.

“There were few alternatives until the trains of modernity started arriving hemming in our faith life into a narrow corridor choking life from it.” (Photo: Maeklong Railway Market, Samut Songkhram, Thailand)

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time