Advent, the season of anticipation. We prepare and wait for Christmas, the coming of our Lord into humanity. For many of us, it is also to anticipate and prepare for Christmas parties, baking the fruit cake and stocking the wine. Maybe more so this year than any other. With this pandemic, we really want to have a good time, to take a break from the virus. And there ain’t nothing wrong with this, for Christ want to be present in the realities of our life, in our merry making too.

The obvious preparation here is to prepare for the coming of Christ. In our immediate sight, the Christmas tree and the birth of Jesus. But Advent today began with the reading of Isaiah, more related to the Second Coming of Christ, when the reality of this world ends, and we are finally judged. Those who are awake enter heaven. Not quite the Christmas we anticipate but a reminder that our Christmas parties are part of this longer spiritual journey.

Between these two comings, the birth and the second, is what Christmas is truly about. Emmanuel – God coming down into the realities of our life to be with us and to accompany us on this longer spiritual journey. We are called to “stay awake” not to anticipate our death but to embrace this presence that is to give us life to the full.

“So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake!” (Today’s Gospel)

I awake everyday before the sun rise. Not to pray or read scripture, just age catching up. Just like the need to breathe, I now need my mobile phone to stay alive. It’s the first thing I reach for. I go into it for my football scores then read a bit of news, no longer sharing concern for the world but rather to see if any would have a direct impact on me. Then I enter Facebook to see what’s happening in the world of my friends. Each day as I wake up, I immediately go into a slumber, drowsy by all the distractions, unable to focus on what is good for my spiritual life.

Advent is this awakening, to be aware that God literally dwells in us, to be conscious and awake to God’s presence in each breathing moment of life. Advent reminds, and prepares us for this. What we need to do is to simply focus on this truth of Christmas. We must tune our minds and take a decision of wanting to experience these God moments, and they will come even in the baking of the fruit cake. We will find him in our satisfaction. And God will also be present in our Christmas parties in the wines we serve as a sharing of love and joy. Keep our focus on the simple because he comes in a manger, in uncomplicated ways.

“And yet, Lord, you are our Father; we the clay, you the potter, we are all the work of your hand.” (First Reading)

Advent is to reclaim this focus, to allow the presence of the Infant King to rule our life. When we are opened each moment to his presence, we put ourselves into the hands of God. Every moment we have the opportunity to encounter Him, each moment when we are focus, we follow his promptings as he leads us through our earthly journey. We are the clay, and you are the potter, and you will eventually shape us into a being that will anticipate with joy your second coming.

Christmas parties will not distract us if we continue to stay awake to this presence. Emmanuel, God is with us and he too will come to our parties.

1^st Sunday of Advent

Last week we were miles away from the centre of Bangkok and chanced upon a bakery famed for its croissant. Curious, we went in. There was a waiting room full of people, seated much like in a hospital waiting to see the doctor. Only that it was more crowded. The ‘doctor’ should be available in an hour. We turned to the takeaway queue. It was serving number 19 and ours was 164. We left.
 
Time is life. What would have motivated me to spend an hour of my life in a queue for a croissant? This is not to detract from anyone who will. One day I might too. Rather I went away curious about how our behaviours have changed as we progressed in time. There is the factor of affluence and then also the allure of social media. Our behaviours have altered with our mobile devices. Innocent as it is fun, it would be nice to upload a photo of being at a trending place.
 
Today we celebrate Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we welcome the new year with Advent. “You will call him Emmanuel”. God with us. Soon our thoughts and schedules will be filled with Christmassy things. And we will welcome the new calendar year with a hangover. So, it may be good to choose this week to look back at our spiritual life and make our resolutions going forward. A good place to reflect on is perhaps how has social media (and wealth, if you have) altered “my behaviour”? Have I left my spiritual life somewhere as a backdrop and who and what is my King?
 
The internet and social media have really opened the world up. There is an amazing wealth of information. Google maps and apps have made places once remote, now accessible and known. Increasingly life is about experiences, queuing an hour for a croissant or eating a local egg breakfast in a remote Thai village. But if we are not conscious, these progressive developments can also make our world a lot smaller.
 
When I was a kid, I bought a weekly football magazine to follow my team. That was all I had to follow my team. As I suffered this poverty of information, I read every word in that magazine and as a result I had a wide knowledge of football. My world was big. Today I have the luxury of clicking on my specific club. That one click eliminates everything else, paradoxically making my world much smaller than it should be. In our hands we have this dangerous tool of becoming too engrossed only with our ‘self’. In today’s world, it is easy to be, “Christ decrease, I increase”.
 
Today’s first reading is good fodder for our reflection. Christ the King is there too in our internet world. He is the good shepherd always looking out for us, wanting to lead us back onto the right path, after we are being scattered by our pre-occupation of self. The reading tells us that God initiates, and He is always present in our midst, an always changing presence in our changing world. Emmanuel, God is with us.
 
“For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; when did we see you hungry and feed you; or thirsty and give you drink? And the King will answer, “I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.”” (Today’s Gospel)

Every time this passage comes along, I go back to a previous sharing of when the ministry I belonged to was running a special Sunday canteen service. The special that day was selling every item for a dollar. I was privileged to experience an elderly couple come up to me to thank us saying that they would not have been able to enjoy such items if we did not sell them for one. Basking in a sea of happy faces, perhaps self-engrossed milking the gratitude, I missed the significance of that encounter. Only that night as I lay in bed, this passage came to me. Yes King, I saw you in the canteen.

Emmanuel, you are in our midst. We must keep focus and not be distracted. Not to be blinded by the kingship of self. Then we will see and know our true King.

Solemnity of Christ the King

I actually mean bottom up.

We go for mass on Sundays. Well, that was the routine pre-pandemic. And we belong to a parish. We are part of a congregation and like it or not, one in a community. We are the lay faithful. We are the church. Not a building, but people entrusted to make relevant the Gospel in our own life, and life that we share with others. We still are whether we go on Sundays or not. This is our personal responsibility.

Our universal Church is structured and organised. We are one among millions of Catholic Christians in life. In an institution where authority is necessary to lead, guide and shape, we the lay faithful sit at the bottom of the structure. We are entrusted to do only small things, unique to who we are and what talent we have. In the small circle of life that we share with others, it is our Christian responsibility to make the Gospel relevant.

“The kingdom of Heaven is like a man on his way abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one; each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out.” (Today’s Gospel)

We each have a unique talent or talents. Some have five, others two or maybe less, one. As Christians, we are to use these talents in a responsible way because at the end of our time we are accountable for them. We are to use them primarily to serve the needs of the Gospel.

We are the lay faithful in a parish setting. The organized structure although necessary for administrative needs is really intended to serve the pastoral needs of the people. Fulfilling these needs cannot be dripped down from the top through layers of hierarchy and authority. We are church that necessitated the institution and not an institution that houses a church. We are the lay faithful, the church, meaning to mission to one another.

Fr. John Murray*, our priest at the Cathedral here in Bangkok wrote this week, “If we want a church of mission that is alive and thriving, it must come from bottom up, it must rise from the faithful and their dreams, vision and needs”.

This is my vision of a vibrant parish. We must start small fires within our parish community. The fires are lit because of needs and vision, our talent the matchstick used to start the fire. It could be to start a ministry to address a certain pastoral need such as to start a Sunday canteen. We each have different talent suiting liturgical, pastoral and prayer needs. We start small pockets of fire within the congregation. Fires here and there that are small but will spread to link up and set the whole parish ablaze.

If we all do that as the lay faithful, wherever we are, the universal Church will eventually be ablaze! This does not work from top down but bottom up.

Fr. John* wisely concluded, “The way to go is to give the faithful space, let them share their dreams, listen to them and let them do it for themselves. No need to urge control, just allow for good order and give people freedom to be and act for the Gospel. Long live the revolution of the Gospel!”

I will “bottoms up” to that.

*Fr. John’s blog:

http://sanctasophiafan.blogspot.com/2020/11/its-about-them.html?m=1

33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

On Saturday, I took a walk in the neighbourhood of a poorer community. I came across this store, it jolted my memory back to a childhood 50 years ago. In today’s expression, this would be called a convenience store. It seemed like time had left this store behind. There it appeared somewhat frozen in a time capsule. Only the old couple aged along with the passage of time. I greeted them and wondered if they ever found happiness in life.

Later that day, I read a write-up about the plight of urban refugees in Bangkok, their situation worsened with this pandemic. They are mainly Pakistani Catholics fleeing various forms of persecution. They are destined to spend years of their life as refugees, each turn of the year bringing fresh hope, each year end adding another stroke to its count. They look to the future, wondering if they have one. They do not have much, only the hope their faith offers. They are not able to eke out a living. Can they eke out happiness in life?

“How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. (Sunday’s Gospel). To be “poor in spirit” means to live our life dependent on God. Hence to be poorer in spirit means to be even more trusting in God that everything will be okay. So, happy will we be, and happy are we when we are poor in spirit. Ours is the kingdom of heaven.

So, what is true happiness? It is true that money does buy happiness. It is a human reality that material comforts do make us happy. The old couple and the urban refugees are likely to agree. We cannot deny this worldly happiness. But we will also need a form of spiritual happiness because we are all humans with an inner being, a soul. Our worldly life is a reality, and its our nature to be always trying to eke out happiness out of it.

From the Gospel of two Sundays ago, there are two sides to the coin, our worldly life, and our spiritual life. But it is one coin. It is inseparable. Being one coin, we understand that worldly life and spiritual life are inter-linked. Our worldly life is a pilgrim’s journey, the pilgrim being our soul, where the pilgrim must navigate to search for her way home to the Creator. The first reading today described this homecoming:

“One of the elders then spoke, and asked me, ‘Do you know who these people are, dressed in white robes, and where they have come from?’ I answered him, ‘You can tell me, my lord.’ Then he said, ‘These are the people who have been through the great persecution, and they have washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb.’” (First Reading)

All of us are being drawn through the passage of life to reach the eternal glory of heaven. The passage of worldly life is a soul’s journey. It is a narrow path to keep the balance between worldly and spiritual happiness. Living the Beatitudes is living a life dependent on God, a Christian lifestyle. Sometimes our lifestyle will seem to be stuck in time, our poverty in spirit making us refugees of modern lifestyles that question the existence of our Creator. But onwards we journey, saints we become.

‘Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.’

All Saints Day