Imagine Peter and the other disciples the day after the crucifixion. Defeated, crushed, confused and frightened to the extreme. Their spirit would be running very much on empty. I wonder what it must have been like for them. Did they still harbor any hope? Did hope actually exist then? If there is no God, what is hope based on?

I try to spend my Holy Saturdays in its proper disposition. But unlike Peter, I have the benefit of hindsight. So I go about, more comfortable than I should, doing the things normally scheduled for a Saturday. But hindsight does lead into complacency.

Complacency in faith simply means I am not paying attention to the Risen Christ in my life. The gospel passage of the journey to Emmaus tell us that he is risen and present in every step of our worldly journey. But complacency allow my worldly-self to dominate my spiritual-self. When it happens, the significance of the emptiness of Holy Saturday is hardly awakened in me.

Along the way we will definitely encounter issues. This is the nature of our worldly journey. Complacency in faith point us toward worldly solutions. But soon enough by this same nature happens an event that will drain our spirit. It weighs down on me like a heavy, unmovable stone. I tried everything of this world but none worked. I begin to feel like the disciples. Who will roll away my stone for me?

Major events in life have entombed me leaving me low and desperately empty. Everyone has left leaving two of us; my worldly-self and my spiritual self. My worldly-self is defeated, crushed. In that emptiness, hope spoke to my spiritual-self. There is a benefit of hindsight here; I remember that my Savior lives. Two selves united, we wait for the risen one to roll away the stone.

Always major events become milestones on our journey of faith. Our two-selves walk our worldly journey like the two disciples walked their way to Emmaus. In the emptiness of a major event, stripped of every worldly possibility, my two-selves miraculously heard and saw someone out of the nothingness of worldly life. In conversations with him, I begin to understand that the Risen Christ has been faithfully present in my worldly life.

Our worldly-self often demand proof, doubting in things unseen and more so when gratification is not almost immediate. The resurrection has showed us how to deal with our life when it descends into many ‘Holy Saturdays’; we keep still and wait patiently. He is there. He is never seen but is visible in the effects that he has on our worldly life.

Unexplained ‘coincidences’ that happened out of nothing and were so timely and altered the path of our worldly life are often not seen. Most times they are the smaller details in our personal life. On our journey, our two selves need to talk and listen to the invisible one who can explain about the many events in our worldly life; the many ‘coincidences’. Only then can we become like the disciple Jesus loved, rushing into our inner tombs to understand that the Risen One is always there in the emptiness. “He saw and he believed”.

The reason in the emptiness is to see the Risen Christ.

The ‘Holy Saturday’ stillness and patient wait. Waiting for the Easter Vigil at the Cathedral of the Assumption, Bangkok

Easter Sunday

The pulse of Lent will pick up as we enter Holy Week. It will remind us of the intensity we felt during the first week. In between I had somewhat fallen off the pace once I got used to the fasting and abstinence. Time carried me through Lent. Did I stop time to reflect? Did I pause it to go deeper into my spiritual self? Amidst all the noise, did I hear the cock crow?

I do wish for an easier path in life. It is easy to navigate life if every day is a good day to get to heaven at the end of it. I firmly believe in God but belief alone will not get me there. Events in life will always conspire to take me off course. The people in my life have a greater influence that I care to acknowledge. Such is the nature of my earthly life, my worldly journey. It is not merely about belief but how I choose to respond.

I read the Passion of Christ with a very simple mind. I try to situate myself in the events of Holy Week to remind my spiritual self what it all means. But the length of today’s Gospel is already a big distraction. And then there is the Easter Triduum ahead demanding my time and attention. I just want to get through this week. Then deep in me I hear a cock crow; my worldly self is denying my spiritual self.

I have assumed that I am one self. If I continue to allow time to carry me through life I will never realize how separate my two selves are. When our worldly life is smooth, often our worldly self dominates our spiritual self. This week the cock crows to say that it should be the other way around.

I am not a bible scholar. I am just one from the pews. I have had my fair share of triumphant, happy days. But when those days came my worldly-self galloped away. Until something happen to take away my happiness. Only when I am in despair will I start to look for my spiritual self. Often it will take me a long time to find it. I find my spiritual self far behind, riding a donkey. The cock crows to say that our response in life must always be rooted in humility.

Today I live in a world full of righteous opinions. I have dished out my fair share. I want to be heard more than I want to listen, I want to be understood more than I want to understand. So much so that relationships are broken, happiness disappear, wars start. In front of Pilate, Jesus stood silent. This is the loudest silence I have ever heard.

So how do I unite my two selves? My worldly-self need to be enlightened so that it could accept that the best vocation in life is to wash other people’s feet. Unity is found when we eventually become a humble servant. ‘Eventually’ because there is a life for all of us to live in this world. There are daily challenges that must be met. We all must go through the journey of life with lessons learnt and lessons applied. The cock will crow when our worldly-self wander too far away from our spiritual-self.

The week ends with Holy Saturday. Time seem to stand still. Whenever we are in deep despair in our worldly life we must wait patiently in hope and faith. Unlike Peter, we have the benefit of hindsight.

In the compound of the Church of St Peter in Gallicantu, Jerusalem reminding us of the triple denial of Peter.

Palm Sunday

“Unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest”.

The grand purpose of our existence is found in our co-existence with others. Life is given to us so that life can be given through us. We are born as individuals, each purposefully unique, to fit into the grand artwork of eternal salvation. The prize of our own individual salvation will be lost if we seek only to win salvation for self. We co-exist for one reason only; to help the other person claim the promise of eternal life.

The message of today point us towards the rich meaning of our existence. Carefully internalized, it tells that each of us, as a single individual, have the potential to positively impact the many lives around us. Our impact can be so powerful that it is so far-reaching, touching even the lives of people we will never meet. We are like a single grain of wheat that can yield a rich harvest.

But first we must fall and die. We must learn that our role in this ‘co-existence’ is to play a servant’s role in the lives of the others; service before self. To be a servant requires us to fall off the high pedestal of self-importance and fall deep into the grounds of humility so as to die to self for the sake of others.

“Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for the eternal life”.

In this world. It is tough to go against the grain of our human nature. This nature, perhaps driven more by fear and uncertainty, rather than selfishness, gravitates towards being self-loving and self-serving. It clings to being self-concerned and self-interested. Social media today may shape us to become more self-absorbed. It is also easier to look for immediate self-gratification. We must die to all these to release the seed in us.

For us to die to self for the sake of others, we must first give away our life so that others will receive life through us. There is a simplicity in this giving of life. The time we have on earth is the amount of life we have. Simply put, when time runs out, life ends. Service for others require that we spend time for them. When we give time, we give life.

The grain of wheat is tiny but every big harvest starts from a tiny seed. Our life can be used to impact the world. This is how enormous we can be. But we cannot do it on our own. When we choose to fall from the pedestal of self-importance to embrace the call to become a servant to all, we surrender the seed in us to be germinated by the power of the Holy Spirit.

When we fall and die to self to be servant to others, we allow the love of God to flow through us to the touch the hearts of others. We plant the seeds of the Good News so that we will journey on to embrace eternal salvation together. This is the grand purpose of our co-existence and we must fall and die to become this servant.

“If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too. If anyone serves me, my Father will honour him”.

5th Sunday of Lent

John 3:16, “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.”

Culture, environment, exposure, conviction all play an important role in building our belief system. Tradition is an important element of the Catholic Church. Tradition in our families and in the faith we practice build and strengthen our belief system.

When a strong belief system is built in us it becomes a reference for the choices we have to make before us. A strong belief built over time and tradition is difficult to break. Most times it is locked deep in us that we do not even question it.

There is a strong case here for infant baptism that make cradle Catholics. Being born into a Catholic family steep in Catholic prayer and tradition installs a belief system in the child. The child will grow up knowing no other faith. Importantly the child will grow with only one truth in life and not have various alternatives. If we truly “believe in him so that we will have eternal life”, then our faith cannot be like a choice sitting on a supermarket shelf with many alternatives around it.

If we really believe in Christ and the Catholic Church, then we believe in the one true God and adopt the way of the Gospel as the way for our self and family. If this is the unshakeable belief for us then how can it be different for our child? If we experience this love of God and are convinced then why are we not wanting to build this belief system for our children?

There are many distractions in the world today; dangers that will take us away from the promise of eternal life. A strong belief system protect us from such dangers. Many of us lose our way in faith somewhere along our journey in life. We are especially vulnerable when life treat us well and we don’t have an urgent need for God. We stray from God happy and unconcerned until the day we hit a crisis. This is when having a strong belief system will save us.

Without the strong belief system we will be unable to hear God calling us back. “The Lord, the God of their ancestors, tirelessly sent them messenger after messenger, since he wished to spare his people and his house. But they ridiculed the messengers of God, they despised his words, they laughed at his prophets, until at last the wrath of the Lord rose so high against his people that there was no further remedy”.

Our belief system is built on the love God has for us. This love is faithful and unconditional. He waits for us while we stray. Love is ultimately an experience. When we stray and eventually return we experience, “God loved us with so much love that he was generous with his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ – it is through grace that you have been saved”.

It is through the continued experience of God’s love in life that our belief becomes unshakeable.

4th Sunday in Lent

The mass ends with this command, “Go and preach the Good News with the life you live”. We have great influence on the people around us especially those who have won our trust. It is for these people, few or plenty, that we are commanded to go and influence their lifestyles with the way of the Good News through our beliefs and action.

Most of us in reality live two lifestyles; part of us faithfully track the Good News while the other part struggle with surrendering everything to God. But this is a result of our human nature and the very reason why the Church exist for us. The Church lives in us and we are in union when we completely trust God but there are parts of us living outside the Church when we are unable, or choose not, to trust completely in the Good News.

Which part of us dominates our lifestyle? How are we influencing the people around us? What ideas do we sell them through our opinions and actions? What are we selling outside the Church?

Today’s Gospel, “Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and in the Temple he found people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting at their counters there. Making a whip out of some cord, he drove them all out of the Temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money-changers’ coins, knocked their tables over”.

The secular world has become a bigger distraction to our faith life – the part of us that lives in the Church. It is a great temptation to come out. The increasingly material world with progressively shorter term fixes tell us that God has become old fashioned. He is perhaps even more old-fashioned when we are tempted towards embracing more liberal lifestyles contrary to the values of the Good News. The biggest reason for falling into these temptations is that we have lost trust in God.

Who are we outside of mass? Who are we outside of Church? Who are we in the secular world? What do we sell on our own tables of plenty?

When our lifestyle does not preach trust in God then we are directly opposed to the first commandment that is given to us to guide us through life. “You shall have no gods except me. You shall not bow down to them or serve them”. Materialism and liberal lifestyles are such gods. Labelling God old-fashioned elevate our self above Him.

There are many other parts of how we live life that we promote on our tables of plenty. Pride and our competitive edge often lead us to bear false witness and kill the reputation of others through our unmerciful tongues. Disrespect of the sanctity of marriage open the doors of liberalism that takes away the guilt of adultery. We steal peace and happiness when we exclude or are prejudice towards others in our life. We feed into the fire of jealousy when we continue to covet what someone else have.

Today Jesus is angry. He makes a whip out of some cord. But he does not lash out at us. Instead he lashes out to destroy what we are promoting and selling. All of us are preserved from this destruction. He only overturned our tables promoting a lifestyle away from the Good News.

As for us we are preserved so that we preach the Gospel with the life we live. We are salesmen of the Good News. We sell Christ.

“What are you selling?” A man on the streets of Yangon selling sparrows for merit-making.

Third Sunday of Lent

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

Exorcism. The casting out of unclean spirits is a dramatic but extreme aspect of faith. Very few of us would have experienced or even witnessed this. It evokes great fear because we will be frightened by the powerful forces at play even though we know and believe in the one authority that will prevail.

“’Here is a teaching that is new’ they said ‘and with authority behind it: he gives orders even to unclean spirits and they obey him.’”

Fortunately our everyday faith isn’t quite as dramatic. But this is not to say we do not deal with unclean spirits every day. None of us is perfect. Perfection comes from within. Within us we battle little demons that block our path to become a better person. Impatience, anger, un-forgiveness, bitterness, vengefulness are some fruits of the unclean spirits in us.

But the authority over them is also in us except that we need to cooperate with this authority; we need to desire to want to be better, to follow his teachings. This teaching is all about love. And the bigger little demons that stand in the way are selfishness, self-centredness and self-righteousness. When we put self above love, our actions will betray the teaching authority.

Imperfect as we are, with little demons in us, the beauty of this love is that we too are entrusted with the responsibility to teach. We have opportunities every day to cooperate with this authority. Words without action is hollow. Today we are better skilled at choosing the right words but they are more harmful if they camouflage the demon of self-centredness.

Jesus was sent to be among us. The first reading, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself, from among yourselves, from your own brothers; to him you must listen.” It adds, “But the prophet who presumes to say in my name a thing I have not commanded him to say, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die”.

We too are sent to be “among yourselves”, in the midst of our families, friends, colleagues and people God has put in our life. We are sent as instruments of his teaching and to demonstrate the action required to add authority to his teaching. This authority, this powerful force that overcome the unclean spirits is Love. We carry this message to others and express it by demonstrating it through action.

We are sent to be prophets, to be little prophets amongst the people in our own little world. We battle the little demons in us to produce better fruits. When our actions are felt and experienced, it gives authority to our teaching. We cannot underestimate the dramatic and remarkable consequence of how ours and another person’s life can changed through the power of love. We as little prophets, no doubt with little demons, are instruments of this.

We too can leave a deep impression on the life of others. “And his teaching left a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught with authority”.

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time