There is a journey ahead for me in life. I wish to God that it will be easier, not only for ourselves but for our children too. Challenges come one after another. I too cannot understand the presence of suffering in life. I wish for a journey of eternal bliss. As I reflect deeper, everlasting joy and happiness only exists in heaven. Wishing for that now is asking for instant death. I am not quite ready for that yet.

So we need to journey on through this life before us. In between now and the entrance of heaven, we must put ourselves on the right track. I grew up reading today’s first reading in fear. Will I be tested as Abraham was with a need to sacrifice my son as a burnt offering so that I could enter heaven?

The passage does not share with us what Abraham was feeling or thinking at that moment. Without any deeper reflection, I read that Abraham had already killed Isaac. Which isn’t true. The passage tells me today of the need to rely on God’s love and mercy in our life. It is not so much that we “must” love God as a law but rather that the only way we can feel his love and mercy is through a relationship of love with Him. In this sense it becomes a “must” for our own good. God put Abraham to test this love.

From this then comes the need to trust in God in everything that lies ahead for us in life. For Abraham this trust came to life when God made a timely appearance to intervene resulting in Abraham becoming a father of all nations with “descendants as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore”.

On that mountain was Abraham’s personal experience of God. We too have our own mountains. Life is full of challenges and sufferings; in the past and in the days ahead. Each event in the past is a preparation for the future. We need to dig deep into our despairs, when all seem so hopeless, to find and experience God’s personal, saving and timely intervention in our life.

The Gospel relates the Transfiguration of Jesus. Our personal experiences when God intervened in our life is our personal experience of the Transfiguration. Each experience left us with these words for the life ahead of us, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to Him”. And we benefited without ever reaching the heights of the trust Abraham had.

God does not create tests using challenges and sufferings on us. Many times these come about, or are compounded by our own choices or the choices of others with consequences in our own life. We cannot blame God for these. And he has the power to put an instant stop to all these but it would, for most of us, be untimely.

So he sends his Son to help us navigate through the challenges in life with a simple instruction, “Listen to Him”. Challenges have divided the self in us. Part of our self is caught like the ram Abraham saw in the bush. The horns of the ram are like the horns of selfishness, greed, lust, jealousy and so on that entangle part of our self, rendering us unable to walk on in faith. This is the “ram” we must take from within us; this ‘self’ that is blocking the love relationship with God reducing our trust in him. This ‘self’ is what we must burn as an offering to God.

Only then will the path of life be easier for us. The challenges and sufferings will still be there but we can respond with today’s psalm, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living”. “With God on our side who can be against us?” Love and trust will keep us on track.

Preparing for the long journey of life. We must stay on the right track to reach our heavenly destination. Through our personal experiences of Jesus when we hear in our life “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to Him”, we gain trust through love to continue our grace-filled journey through life.

Second Sunday of Lent

Another Lent is upon me. I start to go through my rituals of fasting and abstinence. I am used to fasting the whole day but what good will come out of this hunger in me? After all, my body is built like a mini fridge with a large storage capacity enough to go without food for more than 24 hours. But hunger as we know isn’t the point about Lent.

Lent is not about being in the state of hunger. That is a sacrifice. Lent is about the act of giving up something to deny our self and to use our self-denial to allow for the Good News to have an impact on others and on ourselves. It is not about always choosing fish over meat but about the awareness of choosing a lesser alternative to deny self and to use that awareness to consciously work on transforming ourselves to become better people.

Lent is like a period for spring cleaning. Every year I will arrive at Lent with a luggage full of spiritual imperfections accumulated through a year of self-centeredness and self-gratification. By the time I get here, I would feel what the Gospel described. I am parched and weak in a spiritual desert. It is time to reset.

“The Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts and the angels looked after him”.

We arrive at Lent wounded by the world. Opinions are very strong these days; the margin between right and wrong often blurred by the angle of view. We spent the year fighting against the thought that “I am wrong” when I believed “I was wronged”. The process of resetting our life begins by denying the urge to want to prove ourselves right, and in the process cause even more hurt.

“Repent, and believe the Good News”.

We must actually first believe in the Good News before we can repent to transform. To repent without believing is like groping around a dark room. In the dark we will continue to be devoured by the wild beasts. To believe the Good News first is to turn on the lights and allow the angels to show where repentance can bring us.

The Good News tell us that forgiveness brings life. Without that belief, we cannot repent. And the Good News also say that we can never do this on our own. God has the power to make it happen and He is always ready to grant us all the graces we need.

Lent is 40 days; a lot of time requiring a lot of patience. When we dispute one another, both honest in effort in self-denial, God ask for time not to pick a winner but to allow the situation to develop in such that both are right, or even better that He shows us all a better way. Lent is a time of patience to allow his graces to flow to transform life.

Lent is more than habitual rituals. There lies a deeper significance to choosing fish on a Friday. To deny self is to arrest that budding resentment, check that simmering anger and quell that bubbling bitterness to provoke an inner change in us so that our life will become a living testimony to “Repent, and believe the Good News”.

More than choosing fish on a Friday. (Photo: Pla thu, short mackerel, in a market in Samut Songkhram, Thailand)

Doing sinful acts, let’s be frank is fun. Opinions of others matter too much these days. It influences our behavior. Peer group endorsement makes us braver to challenge the limits of a moral lifestyle. We strut along the thin line of what act is sinful and what isn’t. We argue that it is now socially acceptable. Times have changed, God is old fashioned.

Goaded by the people around us we challenge new frontiers of personal behavior. Often we afford to do this when life is kind to us when we have a big group of friends, with a bit more money to spend and of course, in good health. God and his strict codes are pushed into the background. With money and health who needs God? The people closest to us takeover as our moral compass. Wrongly influenced we drift away from God. This is communal leprosy.

Until our life hit a crisis. Most times it requires a physical or material meltdown. We begin to fall out in relationships with the people around us. Gradually at odds with the wisdom of the world we find ourselves alone with our thoughts. Isolated, stripped of communal support, we find ourselves ‘lost’. We reach out in the darkness of our life. “God, are you still there?”

Beset by guilt, we cloak the face of our lifestyle, ashamed that He might see it. We cry, “Unclean, unclean”. Isolated we feel abandoned and unworthy. But it is only in isolation that we will pay attention to the spirit within us. We will come to a realization that God never abandoned us even during the days we wandered far into sin. Isolated, and when we dare open our eyes we find that He is the only one waiting faithfully for us. We are all graced when in isolation.

Our response to this grace today, “You are my refuge, O Lord; you fill me with the joy of salvation”. “I said, ‘I will confess my offence to the Lord’. And you, Lord, have forgiven the guilt of my sin”.

Isolated like a leper we face Jesus and plead on our spiritual knees: “’If you want to, you can cure me.’ Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. ‘Of course I want to!’ he said. ‘Be cured!’”

“Of course I want to!” Only in isolation will we realize the weight of this unconditional love. “Be cured!”

We need to pay attention to communal leprosy; of how we can be part of a community that can either lead others astray or isolate them. Even so if we belong to a church community. As long as we are in a group of people, communal leprosy lurks. It is a disease that spreads whenever we put self before God.

The vaccine is in the second reading from St Paul, “Whatever you do at all, do it for the glory of God. I try to be helpful to everyone at all times, not anxious for my own advantage but for the advantage of everybody else, so that they may be saved. Take me for your model, as I take Christ.”

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The search for happiness is somewhat like a dog chasing its own tail. It will never catch it, we will never find it. Unless we discover the meaning of this life. For many of us, life is stuck in a routine. I felt this way in my mid-life. Then, I had a young beautiful family and a job that pays for a few luxuries but yet deep inside me there was an emptiness. I questioned an existence that revolved around a job to pay the bills, and just to have do it all over again every month. I was not truly happy.

In today’s first reading, “Job began to speak: ‘Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his time no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighting for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages’”.

There is a lot in that emptiness. During the initial months I could not even identify it as an emptiness. Not being happy was a symptom. Progressively, despite the material comforts, I felt a meaninglessness about my life. It was much more than boredom, more than drudgery. There was an emptiness, strangely intense, that was calling out to be filled. Meaninglessness began to feel like an illness.

I searched to fix it but they were all short-term fixes. I took on new hobbies but they didn’t last. My illness was getting worse. The last place I thought of searching was the Church. I already had a Sunday relationship with it. I thought it was enough, but it wasn’t. A voice began to echo in my emptiness. It was calling out for me to serve in a church ministry. That echo could not be quelled.

Where is the meaning of life? If we live life only to gratify self, we will soon find ourselves suffering in the meaninglessness of it all. Meaning in life can only be found if we do things that are life-giving. This is the only path to true happiness. To be life-giving is to find life, and to find it is to receive life. We must get stuck in this routine.

The second reading points us there. “I do not boast of preaching the gospel, since it is a duty which had been laid on me”. And our new drudgery is defined as, “So though I am not a slave of any man I have made myself slave of everyone so as to win as many as I could. I made myself all things to all men in order to save some at any cost; and I still do this, for the sake of the gospel, to have a share in its blessings”.

Many of us are today inflicted by meaninglessness. In today’s gospel, Jesus went into the house of Simon and Andrew to cure Simon’s mother in law. To cure the illness of our meaninglessness, we must allow Jesus into that emptiness. It is too simple just to say to allow him into our heart. We must allow him inside our families and our jobs, inside every issue we face and everything we do. Because with him present in all we get a truer perspective of what we are doing and chasing. With that, the dog will stop chasing its tail.

Life will continue to be meaningless if we continue to be slaves of self-gratification. Pay attention to the voice echoing in the emptiness inside us. He is calling us into a fullness of life; to replace meaninglessness with the meaning of life. Only then can we catch true happiness.

“Meaninglessness” creates a spiritual emptiness in life. While we grapple with it, we find ourselves like a lone sheep lost in a desert. But it is in this spiritual lost-ness that we hear the voice of Jesus our shepherd calling to lead us into the true meaning of life.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time