Families are today challenged to remain holy. To be holy from today’s second reading is to “put on love”. A holy family is centered on the belief in God and the belonging to the Church. But this believe and belonging cannot remain lifeless, it must take on life to put on love. Our faith must be lived, the family the starting place to experience the love for God and love for others.

Christianity is not a religion but a way of life. Families become less holy if belief is merely a religion. We may have mastered the art of preaching about love but we have not done enough to simply love. Society, and now through the power of social media, have promoted many alternative life styles that when put together have become very confusing choices especially for the young entering the adult world. A holy family must put in place a foundation by promoting Christianity as a life style, a life choice.

To simply love, to desire to do good for the other person is something that comes from deep within a person. This is man’s conscience. A Church document says, “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment…For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God”

This conscience need to be formed at an early age. This conscience can be trained to discern. And all these begin in early childhood in the nest of a family unit. A holy family provides its nutrients. Parents must inculcate values into their children to take with them on their journey through life. Because one day our young will fly the nest.

A holy family will also always be challenged. Being holy does not immune us from struggles and disappointments. Being holy equip us to face them. Life will always take us down some unexpected paths but being holy tells us that God will always accompany us down these.

One day when our young children fly the nest, they may also tell us that they are leaving the Church. This is something not uncommon today. A family holy will be a family pained. But let us take a page out of the parable of the prodigal son.

Our children will squander all their spiritual riches of a faith life bequeathed them (from being in a holy family) to live in the world without the guidance (or interference of the Church). Like the father in the parable, parents give their reluctant blessings and pray for the children’s spiritual safety. On the foundation from being a holy family, the children will go into the world with a good conscience. As for the parents, love will bear them an aching heart but faith will assure that Christ will not forget one of his own. This too is being a holy family.

I myself am a personal witness to this. I myself have strayed and returned. I am also privileged to work with many returning Catholics. They left, but when they returned they came home stronger and wiser, and in each of them they had a fire burning for a Christian life style.

In our time away we encountered the love God mostly through the love of others, a faith experience that left us transformed. What is common among all of us returned Catholics is that we all came from a holy family.

Feast of the Holy Family

Advent was all about anticipation, the waiting for an event. In this case the event is Christmas, always happy and merry. So the anticipation becomes exciting; the build-up and waiting laced with fun. This is one wait that is guaranteed to end with delight. Today, Christmas was yesterday. The hangover is heavy but we try to stretch the season for another week but an anti-climactic feel begin to creep in.

The proximity of the New Year to Christmas can have a dampening effect. It used to be a double-header. But the human mind is smarter now, it thinks ahead peeping into the New Year. Where there was once new hope, today there is new anxiety. We now live in a pressure cooker. The New Year re-starts the cycle of anxiety from the fear of losing out. Anticipation become expectations; we must do well in our jobs, our children must do well in school.

Let’s go back to Christmas. Hidden beneath all the revelry, all the wrong reasons for the season, is a gift for us. Let’s go even further to those who are now sensitive to the idea of religion where we cannot say “Merry Christmas” but instead “Happy Holidays”, this gift awaits them too. This gift is “Emmanuel, God is with us”. There is no condition tied to this gift, it is given freely to everyone, not only for believers but also for the ones who cannot bring themselves to mention the Infant Child.

“God is with us” is not for accepting or rejecting. It does not reduce or increase his dwelling among us, if you believe or not. He is present. He is with us. Period.

Life is never meant to be a merry carnival. It can be an emotionally treacherous journey through experiences. “God is with us” to accompany us through this journey; his unconditional love a balm always available to soothe our pains, his infinite wisdom a footprint to follow. God is not in advent, he isn’t anticipating our belief. God anticipates the storms ahead of us in life, he dwells with us to try to pull us into his shelter.

God does not wait for tomorrow to act for us. God is not finished with us because he acted for us yesterday. God acts in the now, in each moment He is present. “God with us” means that. All these moments link yesterday to today to tomorrow. God is also proactive as he anticipates and he moves ahead to show us the way. To make his dwelling among us visible we can retrace events that happened to us, people we have met, angels disguised as strangers, things we have done, things done to us, and link everything together.

These often occur in simple day to day situations. We may get a prompting to write and apply for another job. We do not feel a need for a new job but unexplainably we apply anyway. Then events unfold to put our present job in danger. We get a positive reply for a new job before the storm hit to cause us to lose our current job. That “prompting” is God with us.

Our daily life is filled with such little God moments. These “God moments” are when “God with us” becomes visible to us. It is provoked by a love action or a love thought, a feeling of care or being cared for. They are found even in the very simple insignificant event in daily life, like a smile from a stranger. These are fleeting moments but enough to connect our earth to our heaven.

Let’s reclaim the gift that is Christmas and rediscover the present; this moment by moment when God is with us. Emmanuel.

Day after Christmas

Have we gotten rid of the need to be patient? Computers, internet, high speed technology have made available information at the click of a mouse. Apps on our mobile phones tell us the exact time of our bus arriving so that we don’t waste away minutes waiting. To a certain extent we become agitated when we have to wait. How do we now cope with Advent, an extended time of waiting?

Henri Nouwen says Advent is not like waiting for a bus to arrive. Rather, “it is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for.”

It isn’t difficult to cope with waiting for Christmas Day to arrive. We know for certain when it will arrive. Then we cunningly fill the wait time with parties to celebrate Christmas. Maybe as Nouwen suggest “to live the present moment”? But Advent isn’t about waiting for the big party. Advent teaches us to wait for the Lord to come into the many various challenges we struggle with in daily life. There is no visible timeline, no red letter date circled on the calendar. We wait in darkness, clinging on to hope.

Christmas is about Emmanuel, “God with us”. Christmas is about the Son of God coming to be human like us to journey with us through our earthly life. An inescapable part of our earthly life is the presence of suffering. In all of our sufferings we are invited into an advent, to wait for the Lord to take away our sufferings, to lighten the load on our journey. We pray, we hope, we agitate for him to appear.

Nouwen calls for an “active waiting” but suggests that we be fully alive to this wait. Often we are preoccupied waiting for what we expect of God, blinding ourselves to his unexpected answers and interventions. Nouwen tell us to be aware at each “present moment” in order to see “the signs of the One”. For Christmas comes every day especially when we are challenged; for God is with us, he is amongst us in daily life.

Angels abound in the stories of Advent, but angels abound too in the stories of our daily life. Emmanuel, God has come to be with us in every of our challenges. One of the most visible presence of God when he intervenes in our daily life are the people present to us in the situation. Always God uses the people around us to help us. Often they are strangers appearing as if a coincidence with a timely act, saving the day. These strangers are our angels; they make visible Emmanuel, God with us.

God is often found in the little details of life. It must be so especially if He is a perpetual presence. Being fully aware to the present moment allows us to sense the presence of God, to see Him in the other person and to gratefully accept the helping hand of the stranger because we are alert to know that this is the helping hand of God. Being fully aware of the presence of God will also allow us to realise that God often answer our prayers with a different but better answer. Being stuck in our own expectations can blind us to the fact that God had already answered our prayer quite long ago. We were waiting for nothing.

In His time. There were 42 generations between Abraham and that first Christmas. Even by God’s own standard, that’s a mighty long time to wait. But a lot happened in that long time, our salvation history was sketched. So it in in our personal advent when we wait for God to appear in our troubles. Be aware that at each point he is present and intervening to sketch our own personal salvation.

The click of the mouse is a blessing. It takes away unnecessary wait leaving us more time to spend in advent to know that God is with us. Let us rediscover wait. Merry Christmas.

Advent 2

As I entered this Advent, Pope Francis had just visited Thailand. We were closing the liturgical year proclaiming Christ the King. Advent is a time for reflection; a pondering deep within self in order to prepare the way for the coming of the King at Christmas. We live in busy times. For me Advent can be like the blur of a passing high speed train. I must force myself to stop, so as to ponder and to ask myself “Do I want to belong to this Kingdom?”

Pope Francis said in 2014, “When the Kingdom of God is lessened, when the Kingdom of God decreases, one of the signs is that the sense of sin is lost”. When the sense of the Kingdom of God is lost in its place he said, “Emerges a very powerful anthropological vision, in which ‘I can do anything’”.

We can achieve many things on our own, making us less dependent on the Kingdom. We have become creative in expressing our thoughts and ideas. We are experts in justifying what we do, and won’t do. What is sinful can be argued in today’s context to remove the wrong. Have we truly lost this sense of sin?

Have we also allowed the Kingdom of God to lessen in our life? A more comfortable and intellectual life has allowed us the courage to challenge God. Creativity and technology has given us the freedom to wander away from the Kingdom. Our self-confident complacency has brought us nearer the danger of declaring, “I can do anything”.

To have a sense of sin is to have accountability in belonging to the Kingdom. Sin comes with a sense of guilt. But guilt is not condemnation. There is no judgement yet in the Kingdom. Guilt is the fig leaf covering the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It sharpens the awareness of the presence of God. Having this sense of sin mean that we still belong in the Kingdom of God.

We live in more comfortable times blessed by the fruits of technology. Today God and sin are old fashioned concepts in modern life styles. We empower ourselves with personal rights, “I can do anything”. But sin too has made outstanding progress embedding itself in our thoughts and opinions, hiding behind our ‘rights’, so much so that we have lost this sense of sin.

As we enter these final few days of Advent, we should get off our high speed train before we crash into Christmas. It will do us good to pause, reflect and to rediscover sin.

Advent 1