OUR NECESSARY GETHSEMANES IN LIFE

Without a doubt, the majority of the human population fears death.  And we are not just talking about that moment when our hearts stop beating and all our human biological connections are no longer working.  That would be death with a capital D.  The death that I am referring to concerns all the little deaths that all of us are called to die to while our biological systems are still well connected and working to keep the body physically alive. 

 

It can be easily summed up by calling it the death to the self.  And this is experienced when we make that conscious effort to die to the sinful or temporary pleasures that we often take delight in in life.  It consists primarily of the death of the ego and the false self which so many of us partake in and don’t often think about seriously in our daily life.  That never-ending and relentless lust for something as material as a branded luxury item, like a pair of shoes, or a sparkling gem in the shape of a ring or a bracelet, or a sportscar with an unpronounceable name like a Buggati Veyron or a Ferrari Spider.  It could even be a meal at some Michelin rated eatery that gives one a smile of unending delight, perhaps costing as astronomical as a thousand dollars per diner.  And it doesn’t even have to be something that costs an arm and a leg.  Even lust for a juicy beef burger in a fast food outlet can give a person that same kind of ecstatic delight.  Saying a conscious ‘no’ to these treats is itself an experience of the death that I am referring to.  Of course, right after saying ‘no’ to these temptations doesn’t spare one the nagging and constant thoughts of ‘what if’, wondering how it would feel if one actually made the commitment to splurge that gigantic amount of hard-earned money and made the purchase to obtain the rights to own that merchandise or experience the delights of that exorbitant meal. 

 

In the New Testament, there are about 33 bible verses that have Jesus mention the need to take up our cross and to follow him.  In Mark 8:34, Jesus even goes on to mention the need to deny oneself in life.  Of course, on the Via Dolorosa, Jesus literally takes up his cross all the way up to Gethsemane where the Romans used it crucify him, between two others who were crucified with him on that fateful day. 

 

As God, Jesus knows that it is against the grain of our sinful human spirit to deny ourselves in life.  Little children from the moment of their infancy, simply delight in having things their way.  And if they are denied what they want, tantrums and tears will somehow automatically appear on their innocent faces.  When these moments of ‘innocent’ demands are met, the down side is that the child will grow up thinking that it is just their God-given right to have their way in life.  Of course, when the child starts on their journey of catechesis, hearing of his/her catechists teach about the need to learn how to die to the self would be something completely alien to their minds and ears. 

 

Why does Jesus emphasize the need to die to the self and the need to carry our crosses in life?  Is there something so special in dying to the self that Jesus makes it a point to stress this in his teachings?  But if we take a close look at the apogee of his sacred life, it is at his crucifixion on Calvary that just before he breathed his last, he said the words “it is finished”.  What was finished was the purpose of his earthly life.  In his death on the cross, he accomplished what he was sent on earth to do – which was to overcome the power of death by his own death.  All the miracles and demonstrations of his sacred life were nothing compared to what his death on the cross did.  Through his death and resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion, he triumphed over the last bastion of life.  And not only for himself, but for all who are his followers and members of the Church that he founded. 

 

So as we make efforts in life to renounce ourselves and willingly take up our crosses in life, we too become living members of his sacred life and finally, when we breathe our last on this earth, we too can imitate Jesus on the cross, and say with great gratitude and relief, the three words that Jesus himself uttered on the cross of Calvary, “it is finished”.

 

Each time we strive to die to self and become unafraid of the throes of death and suffering, we ready ourselves for that great death of our lives.  I had a very memorable moment of this when I underwent the whole procedure of getting my needed bone marrow transplant to help me to attain remission from my encounter with Leukemia, which was very life threatening back in the year 2013.  I had to undergo several surgeries and each time as I entered the operating theatre, I had to be administered with a combination of Propofol and Fentanyl to be sedated and numbed from experiencing any pain. 

 

Those moments prior to the activation of the drugs are always a delight to me, as I know that I will be in a state of comatose and would not experience the passing of time.  In fact, each time I was awakened by the nurses post-surgery, I asked the nurse how long the surgery took.  Sometimes it was a two-hour long process, but to me, it felt like I happened to just dose off when the surgeon performed a complex operation like removing my hip joint and replaced it with an implant.  I love the fact that so much can happen if I only willingly allow the anesthesiologist to administer those sleep-inducing drugs into my veins.  From a certain angle, it would seem like an experience of death of some form, and I look at it as a literal death to the self.  There is no point in fighting this whole act of being put to sleep, and I know that there are many people who actually are very against the effect of such anesthesia in life.  I like to joking ask my anesthesiologist before the surgery “so, am I getting the Michael Jackson one or the Prince one?” and he smilingly tells me “you’re getting both of them!”  Nothing beats the joy of seeing your anesthesiologist chortle with laughter.

 

All of us need these kinds of mini-Gethsemanes in our lives.  In our Catholic culture, all of us are encouraged to practice the abstinence from meat every Friday, respecting and remembering that on Good Friday Jesus himself went through his agony on the Cross as he made his way up the Via Dolorosa on the streets of Jerusalem.  This once-a-week penance readies us for the other forms of little deaths as we encounter our small Gethsemanes in life.  Ignoring the calls to practice weekly abstinence from meat inoculates us from willingly die to ourselves in other ways in life.  If we ignore this call to penance so habitually, we will end up like those little children whose parents hardly discipline them when they are denied their petty demands and whims and fancies in life. 

 

May the reading of this blog reflection encourage and give purpose to everyone who has taken precious time to read this writing.  And I pray that your efforts in willingly taking up your own crosses in life with a positive act of your will become your necessary practice so that when it comes to that last moment of your physical life on earth, you too, will be ready to say like Jesus, with eyes looking up towards your heavenly goal, those precious three words of final accomplishment – It Is Finished!

 

 

How do we as Christians broach and appreciate the grace of God?

 

The season and time for the penitential services in the archdiocese has just ended, as we are currently in the period called Holy Week.  Twive a year, the Archdiocese organizes penitential services in all our parishes to allow the people of God's church to come and encounter God's mercy and forgiveness through the celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  These celebrations are organized to encourage the congregation to experience God's underserving love and mercy through the forgiveness of their sins which may have kept them away from the Mass.  In the process of the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation, there is a part where the penitent declares when he or she last went for confession.  There is always a tinge of sadness in me as a confessor priest to hear the penitent say that the last time they went for confession was at the last penitential service.  There are only two times a year that these penitential services are held for the congregation - once in Lent, and the other in the period of Advent.

I say 'tinge of sadness' because there is a certain revelation that the experience of God's great mercy and forgiveness is so blatantly missed that the penitent sees no reason why they ought to make confession as regularly as once every month.   Just leave it to the two times when these services are organized.  They obviously must have missed the point, and I do hope that I am wrong, but I dont want them to take God's mercy and forgiveness for granted.

One of the most dangerous and risky things about our human lives is that there is the sad possiblity of being used to sin.  Hard as we try to inculcate a sense of moral righteousness in our poeple, there is a sad prevalance of habitual sin in the lives of so many people.  The sad truth is that some people can be so used to some sins that they are in fact comfortable with being in a state of sin for the most part of their lives.

No canonized saint in the Church's history was a person who was a habitual sinner.  So many of them pursued the virtue of holiness that they were in fact habitual confessors.

Whenever Good Friday comes along, it never fails to strike me that it is on that one Friday in history when Jesus died on the shameful cross on Calvary, that there was a blatant demonstration of how much God loves us, who for the most part, are terrible and unworthy sinners.  Jesus nailed on the cross and suffering so unmistakably was a genuine show of the extent of God's love for his sinful children.  However, the sad truth may be that this fact is so missed and unseen that so many people display the crucifix on their front doors of their homes, but are still mired in habitual sin, forgetting and taking for granted how much God loves us.

Every Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance in an adoration room is Jesus himself, exposed for veneration and serves to remind us all about the extent of God's immense love for his wayward children.  Perhaps the fact that many adoration rooms are often empty and unvisited just shows how little the laity truly appreciate the love and mercy that caused Jesus to transform humble bread into his sacred body for all for their needed spiritual nourishment.

As a priest, this is a clear sign to me that one of my most important tasks as a shepherd of souls is to remind the laity of this incessantly through my preaching and teaching.  I must never tire of this task as it is something that God wills for me to do as a vital part of my priesthood and vocation.  I just pray that the people will never tire of hearing this but instead, change their ways and attitude toward the Lord in his presence in their lives.

It was theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who coined the term 'Cheap grace" when he wanted to highlight the cost of discipleship.  People are accepting cheap grace when they take the grace that God has granted them for granted.  Deeply appreciating the cost of our salvation is one of the hallmarks of a saint.  May less and less people just receive forgiveness from God without repentance.  True gratitude for God's undeserved mercy changes one's life.  Let us live new and profoundly gratitude for God's amazing grace every day of our lives.

Why is Jesus' Ancestry so dysfunctional?

As Christians, we believe that Jesus is God.  This fundamental belief makes it easy for us to accept and follow many things in the Christian tradition, and it includes the many hymns that we hear during Christmas time.  And because we believe that Jesus is God, we also silently have the belief that Jesus’ family tree and bloodline must have been perfect.  However, it was Raymond Brown, the renowned biblical scholar, who said that Jesus’ bloodline was really far from perfect, and we need to reject thoughts that Jesus must have been descended from a line of perfect, scandal-free and bad history.  And this is insightfully true, because there is much in his origins that is rather strikingly jolting, perhaps as shocking as any contemporary church scandal.

 

Within the genealogy of Jesus, the there are in fact many sinners, liars and schemers, like there are in the lives of many of the canonized saints, honest people, and the heroic lives of the men and women of faith.

 

In Jesus’ genealogy, there are a number of men and women who were not the stalwarts of the love, charity, faithfulness and purity of Jesus.  To be clear, there was Abraham who unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, who rationalized that God favors some people over others; and then there’s Jacob who stole his brother Esau’s birthright; and of course, David who committed adultery and then had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite, murdered so as to cover up an unwanted pregnancy David created in order to marry her.

 

And of course, there were the few women named in the genealogy who were remarkable for the wrong reasons.  The gospels don’t mention Sarah, Rebekah or Rachel who were regarded as holy women.  Rather, the following get mentioned – Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.    Tamar was a Canaanite woman who seduces her father-in-law so that she can have a child.  Rahab was another Canaanite woman (an outsider) who is in fact a prostitute.  Ruth was another outsider (a Moabitess) and of course, Bathsheba, the woman David commits adultery with who loses her husband when David plans to have him murdered to cover up his secret love affair.

 

Isn’t it interesting to know that these four named women were  either strange or scandalous, yet they paved the way to give us Jesus.  And it is no accident that these four woman are linked to Mary, Jesus’ mother, since she too found herself in a taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was deemed strange and perculiar. 

 

Whenever I get to read the genealogy of Jesus at Mass, I always tend to glace at the congregation to see if there are any shocked or flabbergasted looks as the names of Jesus’ ancestors are read out.  Without a doubt, there would be quite a few faces that are wide awake, but puzzled whenever some names are mentioned, and it is not because of my bad pronunciation of their names.  They know that some of these names are quite simply taboo to be listed in Jesus’ genealogy.  Quite often, I come to the conclusion that they would rather that Jesus come from a perfect and faultless, and scandal-free bloodline.  Yet, the axiom that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is true, even where Jesus is concerned.  There are some of the names in the list that have nary any specialness or significance.  Jesus’ human blood was a result of a mixture of the great and the small, the holy and the not-so-holy as well.

 

The hard truth is that we may have very high standards for Christ.  But there’s a downside to this – we may be forgetting that we too, are also responsible to continue the story of Jesus’ incarnation.

 

Jesus’ genealogy shows that God did not get stopped by the scheming and the scandalous.  God uses the pure and the impure.  This raises our own standards in life for ourselves, because we too, can be usable by God to write his way into the life of this world.  We cannot too easily exclude ourselves from being people who can be effectively used by God to bring his mercy and love into a world that aches and longs for God’s presence in its very existence.  Don’t write ourselves off too easily. 

 

This gives us so much hope.  None of us is too sinful to be used by God to continue the incarnation of Jesus in the world.  God can use us, simple or dysfunctional that we think we are, to bring the presence of Jesus to the world.  And I believe that this hidden truth is a truism that has not been addressed loudly enough to give everyone hope in this life and it should not be a hidden secret kept because of the fear of embarrassment.  If it is, it will be a shame.

 

The Overiding Despair of Boredom

There is a part of me that has his eyes on myself and sometimes makes certain judgments based on what he sees.  It has to be that vain part of me that is way too concerned about how the self is behaving and how others see me.  Lately, it has been quite clear to me that this other self of me sees Fr Luke as a person who is feeling the dreariness of being bored in life.  How can one emerge healthily if one views life as somewhat boring and unexciting?  I believe this is a perennial question that bothers and upsets many many people.

 

My spiritual readings are wide and varied.  One of the things I read often are the spiritual musings of the spiritual gurus in life.  The acclaimed writer and thinker Fr Ronald Rolheiser is one of my regular pursuits, and it was most endearing to find that he wrote a blog on boredom.  In the way that a master of novices enlightens the minds of the disciples under him, Fr Rolheiser’s writing enlightened me with his insight on boredom.  In a nutshell, he asks his readers why is it that despite the world giving us human beings all sorts of gadgets and technological devices to link us to everything, we are still not insulated against boredom?  The result is that we still wrestle with boredom because stimulation doesn’t make for meaning.  We are bored because so many of us do not take a deeper interest in people and things. 

 

I am not sure if it is because I exist now as a Catholic Priest that I find that lately I have been taking a deeper and deeper interest in the very person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  In my moments of prayer and meditation, I am often just focused on the very life of Jesus, and in my mind’s eye, see him in his ministry activities, moving from place to place and speaking to the people of Israel, loving them, touching them and healing them.  But I do not do one thing that is even more necessary.  I do not enter into his mind and see as Jesus sees.  I only observe as an outsider, akin to a reporter viewing an activity so that he can write a report worthy of being published on paper for others to read.

 

Fr Rohr tells us that the word interest is derived from two Latin words: inter (inside) and esse (being) which, when combined, connote being inside of something.  This means that things are interesting when we are interested enough to really get inside of them.  The key to my being no longer bored in life is to get inside of the mind and heart of Jesus when I enter into my moments of meditation.

 

I realise that I may have been experiencing boredom in life largely because I was too internally impoverished and self-centered to take a genuine interest in the people I encounter and in the case of my prayer, when I fail to take a genuine interest in the person of Jesus.  And it was Einstein who said that ‘Experience is not what happens to us, it’s what we do with that happens to us’. 

 

This enlightenment puts a whole new dimension into my spiritual life.  It makes going to the Adoration Room such a large and expansive encounter.  I pray that you, my reader, are able to comprehend and are inquisitive enough to want to pursue this journey in your spiritual walk in life.  It will change everything for you, God willing.