Being part of the mystery: 3rd Sunday of Easter

 A few years back…  I was attending a birthday party for an 8-year old. We had music, presents, family, friends and even a piñata which the birthday boy eventually struck after threatening to strike everyone else before that. And then came the final act. One of the family friends was a good magician and started to show off some of his tricks.

By far, the most popular of his tricks was extracting coins seemingly out of the children’s ears. We were all thrilled and entertained. But not equally. The way we were thrilled was very different.

As the magician started to withdraw money from the children’s heads as if it were a  mini-bank,  the crowd was instantly divided. On one side, there were those like me, on the other, those like the children.

I, as with the rest of the adult crowd, was intrigued. How did he do it? I know there was a trick somewhere, but where? We were paying close attention and waiting for a false move that would give the trick away. We were thinking, reflecting, analysing, wondering, and also keeping our distance.

The children, however, could not keep their distance. The magician became a living child’s magnet. In seconds, all of them were jumping around him and screaming “Do it to me. Do  it to me!” For them, that was not a mystery to be scrutinized, they just wanted to be part of it.

Magic disturbs the scientifically trained mind. It attempts to show that the immutable laws of physics do not apply. If money can grow out of children’s heads, I am sure there will be something we can do about it. Adults need to discover the trick to pacify their minds, to dismiss the event and go back to their daily routine.

Children, on the other hand, do not know yet that there are immutable laws, they are just drawn by curiosity to unusual things. For them, a TV is as magic as a disappearing act. We have learned to dismiss the TV magic because, even if we don’t understand the trick of how things that are happening in Iraq can also be shown in our living rooms,  we know that some technician knows how it happens and can give us a reasonable explanation. We know it is not magic, simply complicated technology.

The day the children used their thinking to dismiss the mystery, they would have become adults. Perhaps, that is what Jesus meant when He said, that unless we become like children, we will not inherit the kingdom.

When Jesus appears to His disciples after death, they are looking for the trick. Is He a spirit? Thomas would even ask for proof, “It is all a trick of your imagination, unless I see and touch by myself.” Jesus was very patient with them. He knew they were looking for the trick and tried to invite them to become like children again. This time, there was no trick. It is true, “It is indeed I”, He then invited them to be part of the mystery: “Stay in the city, until you are clothed from power from on high.” 

“He then, open their minds to understand the Scriptures…”, the gospel tells us. In the first reading Peter declares he is a witness to that understanding, that what the Scriptures (and Prophets) have been foretold is that God’s Christ would suffer. Lastly the second reading also speaks about knowing God: “Anyone who says, ‘I know Him’, and does not keep His commandments, is a liar.”

We constantly suffer the adult temptation of understanding God to pacify our minds so that we can move on with the “real” issues of our busy existence. There is understanding to dissect and dismiss, and there is understanding  to embrace and change. The children’s desire was to be part of the magic; the adult’s desire was to dismiss the magic. We need to learn to combine the maturity of the adult and the genuineness of the child. We need to learn to scream to God: “Do it to me.”

It is useless to try to understand God from a distance. The Jews had been reading the Scriptures for ages. We can go over the whole Old Testament word by word and we will never guess that the Messiah “had to suffer” and whoever it was all there, in front of their eyes. To understand the prophecies, the church will have to re-read the Old Testament, but only after God has made them experience the mystery… only when the church was part of God’s mystery… only then could God play the magic on them.

When we are part of the mystery, our understanding opens a new world in front of us. When our understanding is suspicious, we will be closed to any world that is not in our daily routine. To say that we know God but we are not part of Him makes us liars because we are only “trick-seekers”. The mystery of the resurrection, the mystery of why the “chosen one” had to suffer, the mystery of how God can love us so much as to become a victim of his creature can only be understood from inside -  when God performed the “mystery on us”.

May we learn to ask to God to keep doing His mystery on us.

The core of the cross: Good Friday

As I was looking at this image in the ”porta lignea” of the basilica of St. Sabina in Rome, it stirred me to ask an interesting question. Why is the cross important for our faith?

 This picture shows the first representation of the crucifixion that has been preserved to our days. What is interesting is that it dates back as late as the 5th century. Other Christian symbols have been preserved from the beginning of the church: the fish, the bread, etc… but no crosses or crucifixes. Why? Did it take the first Christians five centuries to discover the centrality of the cross? Did the 5th century Christians suddenly discover the importance of the crucifixion?

This representation does not pretend to innovate a symbol, it is simply a representation of a scene shown among many other scenes. In fact, the crosses are barely visible, what is shown is the crucified. Does the cross deserve to be our most outstanding symbol?

Perhaps symbols evolve and change with cultures, but the core of our faith is expressed in the gospels, which some scholars have described as accounts of the passion and resurrection, with a long introduction. Accepting that Jesus “must suffer according to the Scriptures” is an essential condition to true faith in Jesus.

The cross is not just an unfortunate episode in the life of Jesus. Jesus did not even save us “in spite” of the cross, but through His cross. Jesus was not a simple hero or martyr whose torments were an expression of their fidelity and consistency. His passion revealed a Redeemer. If the incarnation of Jesus reveals God with us; the crucifixion reveals God for us.

Jesus had been in control of His life and destiny clearly throughout His whole ministry. He decided whom to cure, where to go, what to preach, when to leave, whom to approach. He is the master. There is, however, a turning point in the life of Jesus when He was assailed by an extreme distress. In the synoptics, it happened at the Garden of Olives. The gospel of John presents this extreme distress at the beginning of the Last Supper. From then on, Jesus was passive. He would let things happen to Him. He would not run away or hide Himself. He would not defend Himself or even pray to be delivered. He allowed men to do with Him as they pleased. This was a unique moment in the history of the universe. God had become vulnerable, tragically vulnerable.

The passivity of Christ is the passion of God who decided to be touched and hurt by the sin of the world. Christmas makes full sense only in the light of Good Friday. God’s incarnation was not to holiday with humans. God became man to allow Himself to be touched by man’s rejection. Capital punishment is simply that, the expulsion of a man from the community. The cross is man’s way to tell God, “we don’t want you with us”. The Son of God attracted upon Himself the ultimate expression of man’s sinful condition.

An omnipotent God could be totally dispassionate about man’s disobedience; a compassionate God cannot but implicate Himself in man’s self-destruction to the point of taking the effects of this destruction upon Himself. Christmas is God accompanying man; Good Friday is God substituting man as a true victim of human sins. And all this is not a symbolic ritual sacrifice;  it is pure crude history, a naked fact. God came to His creation and was tragically rejected in the nastiest possible way.

From now on, sin cannot say anything else. The human power to hurt cannot become more powerful. It has been exhausted. Of course, we are still free to hurt ourselves and others, and these hurts will be real and consistently have tragic effects in our lives. But from now on, these sins are only mere echoes of the main cry “Crucify him!” Sin had spoken its loudest.

However, is this the last word?

Do you understand what I have done for you?: Maundy Thursday

The word “maunday” comes from a verse version of the Latin “mandatum” command. It refers to Jesus’ command “you ought to wash one another’s feet” (Jn 13:14).

Interestingly, the church has never received this “command” in the ritualistic sense. Although there were a few Christian sects that practice the rite literally, the church has received this commandment only as an imitation of the spirit of this rite. In fact, the ritual of the washing of the feet  is not mandatory, not even on Maundy Thursday. All the more for us to strive to understand the spirit of this gesture. The poignant question of Jesus to his disciples is still a good question today: “Do you understand what I have done for you?” (Jn 13:12)  Do we?

 In Jesus’ time, the washing of feet was a custom that was not required from anyone, not even slaves, although “occasionally, disciples would render this service to their teacher or rabbi” (Raymond E. Brown).

It is not surprising that Peter refuses this apparent reversal of preposition. Peter, or other disciples, should wash Jesus’ feet. However, Jesus was very clear. He does not mean that the disciples have become suddenly masters: “You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am.” (Jn 13:13).

Jesus had intended something very different: “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do. Amen, amen, I say to you. No slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” (Jn 13:14-16)

In other words, although the distinction between master and disciples is real, the relationship becomes one of equality. If the master dares to treat the disciples like masters, all the more, the disciples should treat each other like masters. Although we are all different, when it comes to service, we become all equal. Servants have, in a way, received the dignity of masters without being masters. Dignity refers to something’s goodness on account of itself (Aquinas). The disciples have received something good, a master’s treatment from the master. They now become equal in dignity.

Love, unlike washing feet, cannot be commanded (Deus caritas 18). God does not force us to produce an emotion towards our neighbors. It does not work like that. Often, we forget this, and change the commandment of love into a pretense of love: “I do not really love him, but I will act as if I did.” We pretend to love only because we are told. Like Peter, we accept the commandment without understanding: “not only my feet, but also my hands and my head as well.”

Love cannot be understood unless it is experienced. It cannot be produced unless it is received. Only the disciples that received the master’s treatment by the master can give the master’s treatment to others. Washing each other’s feet entails removing our clothing of pretenses of superiority, acknowledging the equal dignity of the other person, and treating them consistently.

In this way, love does not become a product of our strength but a natural reaction to the goodness we just discovered in the other person. At times, we may not like them. We may even have good reasons to hate them, but still Jesus washed their feet with our feet. Jesus saw in them something we must discover, and when we do… we realized what Jesus had done, we understand and we are empowered to love as Jesus loves.

Does God alone suffice?

It is easy to praise God, when we are blessed, but how about when we are in the middle of misfortune?
One of the most degrading misfortunes is loneliness. Jean Vanier tells the story of Claudia. In 1975, he welcomed Claudia into their l’Arche community New Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

“She was 7 and had spent practically her whole life in a dismal, overcrowded asylum. Claudia was blind, fearful or relationships, filled wit inner pain and anguish. Technically speaking she was autistic. Her anguish seemed to increase terribly when she arrived in the community, probably because in leaving the asylum, she lost her reference points. Everything and everyone frightened her. She screamed day and night and smeared excrement on the walls.

Claudia lived a horrible form of madness which should not be idealized or seen as a gateway to another world. Madness has a meaning. It is an escape from anguish. But there is an order in the disorder that can permit healing, if only it can be found.  20 years later Claudia was quite well. She still liked being alone but she was clearly not a lonely person. She would often sing to herself and there was a constant smile on her face. Jean Vanier asked her a question one day: “Claudia, why are you so happy?” Her answer was a smile and direct: ‘Dios’ (God).”

Loneliness can indeed become hell on earth. In fact, solitary confinement is the punishment most dreaded by prisoners. Loneliness has other side-effects like depression, self-destructing desires, lack of will to live, etc.

Today’s gospel tells us of the loneliness of Jesus. The gospel of Mark does not mention the details other gospels offered. But the few details are poignant. Jesus was in the company of angels and wild beasts. Wild beasts are not dangerous as we may suppose. Wild animals are understood as non-domestic animals– animals that don’t belong to the world of men. Jesus was accompanied by the whole creation except human beings. Jesus was having a taste of Adam’s solitude: “it is not good for man to be alone.” In a way, Jesus was fasting, not only from food, but from human company altogether.

Only after passing this test of solitude with God did Jesus come back to the human world to preach the Good News. His tested human experience that God alone suffices, gave him the authority and the content of the “GoodNews.”

We should ask ourselves if our joy comes from the assurance of being with God, or from being with people who like us? Does our happiness come from the little comforts of our life or from God alone? There is only one way to know. Testing it. Give up company, give up the little pleasures and see where your happiness goes?

Peter associated conveniently these waters of destruction with the waters of the baptism of new life: a new creation. Both the first and second readings are about new beginnings, just like the gospel is about the beginning of the public life of Jesus. In the Ark, Noah and his family begin a new creation. In the loneliness of the flood, what appears to be the end becomes the beginning, thanks to the seeds of life they spared (a pair of each species of animals). When loneliness carries the seeds of new life, it overcomes destruction with fertility.

The church invites us to fast and abstain for 40 days to remember the forty days of Jesus, and the 40 years of Israel in the desert. To accompany Jesus in this trial of being alone with the Father, we need to accept the invitation of the Church to give up our little dependencies to reach our inner loneliness with God. We need to search the seeds of life from which a new revival of faith will unveil the ever new aspect of Easter.

The Beauty of Truth

In his book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” Darwin tries to explain how the expressions of humans came about. In his studies, he realizes that many artists fail to depict faithfully these expressions:

“It is, however more probably, that these wonderfully accurate observers intentionally sacrificed truth for the sake a beauty,than they made a mistake; … but a lady who is perfectly familiar with this expression, informs me that in Fra Angelico’s ‘Descent from the Cross,’ in Florence, it [this particular expression] is clearly exhibited in one of the figures on the right-hand; and I could add a few other instances.” (The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 193)

It is interesting that the one artist that did not sacrifice truth for the sake of beauty is a Dominican painter and saint whose feast we celebrate today.

In the Dominican traditional theology, God attracts man in many ways. God is the supreme Truth  because man’s intellect is wired to search for the ultimate answer to the ultimate question. God is also the supreme Good for man because man is wired to search for self-fulfilment, and this will never happen away from God. But God is also the supreme Beauty because we are made to contemplate Him “face to face” as He really is, for all eternity.

In our western traditions, we are not too used to thinking that God is beautiful. Perhaps because we are not used to that image of God, which is more familiar with the Eastern churches. However, it is still a great preaching tool to be able to show God’s beauty. Unlike truth, beauty does not convince. It simply attracts with delight. In a world suspicious of any imposition of truth, the appeal of God’s beauty needs to be seriously reconsidered.

Fra Angelico certainly knew how to put this into practice. In him, we have a lesson for our age.

St. Margaret of Hungary

ST MARGARET OF HUNGARY, VIRGIN (A.D. 1270)

Very great interest attaches to the life of St Margaret of Hungary, because by rare good fortune we possess in her case a complete copy of the depositions of the witnesses who gave evidence in the process of beatification begun less than seven years after her death. No doubt the fact that she was the daughter of Bela IV, King of Hungary, a champion of Christendom at a time when central Europe was menaced with utter destruction by the inroads of the Tatars, has emphasized the details of her extraordinary life of self-crucifixion. The Dominican Order, too, which was much befriended by Bela and his consort Queen Mary Lascaris, was necessarily interested in the cause of one of its earliest and most eminent daughters. But no one can read the astounding record of Margaret’s asceticism and charity as recounted by some fifty witnesses who were her everyday companions without realizing that even if she had been the child of a beggar, such courage as hers –one is almost tempted to call it the fanaticism of her warfare against the world and the flesh — could not but have a spiritual influence upon all who came in contact with her. Bela IV has been styled “the last man of genius whom the Arpads produced”, but there were qualities in his daughter which, if determination counts for anything in human affairs, showed that the stock was not yet effete.

Margaret had been born at an hour when the fortunes of Hungary were at a low ebb, and we are told that her parents had promised to dedicate the babe entirely to God if victory should wait upon their arms. The boon was in substance granted, and the child at age of three was committed to the charge of the community of Dominican nuns at Veszprem. Somewhat later, Bela and his queen built a convent for their daughter on an island in the Danube near Buda, and there, when she was twelve years old, she made her profession in the hands of Bd Humbert of Romans. Horrifying as are the details of the young sister’s thirst for penance and of her determination to conquer all natural repugnance, they are supported by such a mass of concurrent testimony that it is impossible to question the truth of what we read. That she was exceptionally favoured in the matter of good looks seems to be proved by the determination of Ottokar, King of Bohemia, to seek her hand even after he had seen her in her religious dress. No doubt a dispensation could easily have been obtained for such a marriage, and Bela for political reasons was inclined to favour it. But Margaret declared that she would cut off her nose and lips rather than consent to leave the cloister, and no one who reads the account which her sisters gave of her resolution in other matters can doubt that she would have been as good as her word.

Although the majority of the inmates of this Danubian convent were the daughters of noble families, Princess Margaret seems to have been conscious of a tendency to treat her with special consideration. Her protest took the form of an almost extravagant choice of all that was menial, repulsive, exhausting and insanitary. Her charity and tenderness in rendering the most nauseating services to the sick were marvelous, but many of the details are such as cannot be set out before the fastidious modern reader. She had an intense sympathy for the squalid lives of the poor, but she carried it so far that, like another St Benedict Joseph Labre, she chose to imitate them in her personal habits, and her fellow nuns confessed that there were times when they shrank from coming into too intimate contact with the noble princess, their sister in religion. One gets the impression that Margaret’s love of God and desire of self-immolation were associated with a certain element of willfulness. She would have been better, or at least she would assuredly have lived longer, if she had had a strong-minded superior or confessor to take her resolutely in hand; but it was perhaps inevitable that the daughter of the royal founders to whom the convent owed everything should almost always have been able to get her own way.

On the other hand, there are many delightful human touches in the account her sisters gave of her. The sacristan tells how Margaret would stroke her hand and coax her to leave the door of the choir open after Compline, that she might spend the night before the Blessed Sacrament when she ought to have been sleeping. She was confident in the power of prayer to effect what she desired, and she carried this almost to the point of a certain imperiousness in the requests she made to the Almighty. Several of the nuns recall an incident which happened at Veszprem when she was only ten years old. Two Dominican friars came there on a short visit, and Margaret begged them to prolong their stay. They replied that it was necessary that they should return at once; to which she responded, “I shall ask God that it may rain so hard that you cannot get away”. Although they protested that no amount of rain would detain them, she went to the chapel, and such a downpour occurred that they were unable, after all, to leave Veszprem as they had intended. This recalls the well-known story of St Scholastica and St Benedict, and there is in any case no need to invoke a supernatural intervention; but there are so many such incidents vouched for by the sisters in their evidence on oath that it is difficult to stretch coincidence so far as to explain them all. Though we hear of ecstasies and of a great number of miracles, there is a certain moderation in the depositions which inspires confidence in the good faith of the witnesses. An incident which is mentioned by nearly all is the saving, at St Margaret’s prayer, of a maid-servant who had fallen down a well. Amongst the other depositions we have that of the maid, Agnes, herself. Asked in general what she knew of Margaret, she was content to say that “she was good and holy and edifying in her conduct, and showed greater humility than we serving-maids”. As to the accident we learn from her that the evening was so dark that “if anyone had slapped her face she could not have seen who did it”, and that the orifice of the well was quite open and without a rail, and that after falling she sank to the bottom three times, but at last managed to clutch the wall of the well until they lowered a rope and pulled her out.

There can be little room for doubt that Margaret shortened her life by her austerities. At the end of every Lent she was in a pitiable state from fasting, deprivation of sleep and neglect of her person. [1] She put the crown on her indiscretions on Maundy Thursday by washing the feet (this probably she claimed as a sort of privilege which belonged to her as the daughter of the royal founders) not only of all the choir nuns, seventy in number, but of all the servants as well. She wiped their feet, the nuns tell us, with the veil which she wore on her head. In spite of this fatigue and of the fact that at this season she took neither food nor sleep, she complained to some of the sisters in her confidence that “Good Friday was the shortest day of the year”. She had no time for all the prayers she wanted to say and for all the acts of penance she wanted to perform. St Margaret seems to have died on January 18, 1270, at the age of twenty-eight; the process of beatification referred to above was never finished, but the cultus was approved in 1789 and she was canonized in 1943.

See the Acta Sanctorum for January 28; but more especially G. Fraknoi, Monumenta Romana Episcopatus Vesprimiensis, vol. i, pp. 163-383, where the depositions of the witnesses are printed in full. Cf. also M. C. de Ganay, Les Bienheureuses Dominicaines, pp. 69-89; and Margaret, Princess of Hungary (1945), by “S. M. C.”
[1] This neglect of cleanliness was traditionally part of the penitential discipline, and was symbolized by the ashes received on Ash Wednesday. The old English name for Maundy Thursday was “Sheer Thursday”, when the penitents obtained absolution, trimmed their hair and beards, and washed in preparation for Easter. It was also sometimes called capitilavium (head-washing).

St. Francis de Capillas

St. Francisco Fernandez de Capillas was proclaimed Protomartyr (First Martyr) of China on 16 September 1748 by Pope Benedict XIV. Two centuries later, Pope Pius X was to beatify him on 2 May 1909. Almost another century after his beatification, he was canonised by Pope John Paul II on 1 October 2000. His feast is celebrated on the 15^th of January.

Angelic, penitential and mortified, it was declared that even if he had not been martyred, he could still have been beatified. The saint who was the first to shed his blood for Christ in China was born in Baquerín de Campos in Palencia, Spain, on 14 August 1607. He eventually entered the Dominican Priory of St. Paul of Valladolid. In February 1632 he arrived in Manila and was ordained to the priesthood. He then ministered for several years in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines.

In 1641, at the Provincial Chapter in Manila, he asked permission to evangelise in the Celestial Empire (China). This was granted and he left with his friend, Father Francis Díez, for Formosa, where they stayed at the House of All Saints in Jilong. In March 1642 they crossed to Fujian, where Father John García welcomed them. Due to persecution, he was the only Dominican priest left in China.

St. Francisco de Capillas began his pastoral ministry at once, and these years, 1644-1646, are called the Golden Age of the mission. Along with Father Díez, he founded the Lay Dominicans in China. He also converted huge numbers of Chinese in all the towns and villages. Especially worthy of mention were his highly virtuous life and conduct, which won him the love and respect of all whom he met. On 4 November 1646 Father Díez died, assisted by the gentle saint. On that same day, the Tartars entered the city, destroying, looting and killing, and with an Imperial edict to kill the missionaries.

The apostolic works undertaken by St. Francisco de Capillas were innumerable. One witness testified that “when he was on the road, he had such a great desire to help souls that to climb the steep mountain roads seemed easier than to walk on level roads.”

One year after Father Díez’s death, St. Francisco de Capillas was captured. He had gone without fear at the height of a local riot to a small village on 13 November 1647 to administer the Sacraments to a sick person. Upon his capture he was taken with a rope tied around his neck to the Mandarin tribunal. Put in the worst jail, he was subjected to the torture of crushing the ankles while being dragged all over the floor. Then he was flogged and incarcerated for two months, condemned to death and enduring patiently the horrible torments inflicted on him.

While in prison, he wrote: “I am here with other prisoners and we have developed a fellowship. They ask me about the Gospel of the Lord. I am not concerned about getting out of here because here I know I am doing the will of God. They do not let me stay up at night to pray, so I pray in bed before dawn. I live here in great joy without any worry, knowing that I am here because of Jesus Christ. The pearls I have found here these days are not always easy to find.”

On January 15, 1648, the judge came and ordered that he be flogged again and put into the sentry box of the city wall. He was ordered to step down from the box, and as he did so, the executioner beheaded him, separating his head from his body with a heavy blow of the sword. His body was thrown outside the city wall and found two months later. It was preserved incorruptible for two months, and was left untouched by a fire that reduced to ashes the house where his coffin was kept. Of the many relics of St. Francisco de Capillas which have been preserved, the most important remains his head, which is found in the convent of St. Paul of Valladolid, where began his religious life.

Old year

Yes, I have been away. Literally away to Hong Kong and Cambodia. Sorry, no pictures. When I came back, I encountered a hardware problem which took me a while to sort. Just before 2009 comes, I should point out that this blog was born out of a new year’s resolution. It could have been much better, much more regular and more impactful, so, in that sense,  it has been a bit disappointing. On the other hand, it has helped me to keep striving to write and to keep struggling to put into sentences, the chaotic labyrinth of ideas that inhabits my mind. Let us hope, next year is better.

How big is His love? 29th Thursday

We pray in the opening prayer, “Heal our blindness”. This is the kind of blindness that makes us reluctant to receive Jesus Christ and causes His message to bring fire to earth (Lk 12:49). It is the blindness to see how much we are in need of healing. Jesus’ message needs to burn before it heals; needs to split before it unites; for there will always be resistance to listening to his message and accepting it.

This is why St. Paul prays that we know Christ’s love (Eph 3:19). A love that surpasses all knowledge but that has been revealed to us as part of the mystery hidden from all ages. How much is the breadth, the length, the height and the depth of His love? This is not a conceptual question. It should be the question that perpetually animates our lives, because in its answer lies the healing of our blindness.

We do not always accept love. Tales of unrequited love plague love stories. Just because someone loves you, does not necessarily push you to love him or her in return. We are not inclined to love the lover per se. We are inclined to love what appears good for us.

To say that God loves us, is not enough to push us to love Him. To ponder on the immensity of Christ’s love opens ourselves to its grandeur and becomes attractive and lovable to us. It helps us to take His side on the irreversible division and fire He has already started.

Rights of migrant workers

 n“Institutions in host countries must keep careful watch to prevent the spread of the temptation to exploit foreign workers, denying them the same rights enjoyed by nationals, rights that are to be guaranteed to all without discrimination… Immigrants are to be received as persons and helped, together with their families, to become a part of societal life. In this context, the right of reuniting families should be respected and promoted.”

Catholic Church, CSDC 298

Wednesday of the 23th week: Welcoming Migrants

I have come to know that people of Serangoon Gardens are getting uncomfortable with the idea of having a dormitory for migrants built in their vicinity.

It seems that people love to enjoy nice developed Singapore at the expenses of low salary foreign workers but find it hard to have them living next to them. It is sheer hypocrisy to want foreign workers to work here but not want them to live here.

It seems that the main “damages” that foreign workers do are to dirty the place and date foreign maids. I suppose that the same laws apply for Singaporeans and foreigners when it comes to hygiene. As to dating foreign maids, who says maids must take a vow of virginity when they come to Singapore? It is funny how people are interested in getting their children to marry, but wished their maids could not even have social life.

We seem to forget that to help families in Singapore, we might be destroying or incapacitating families in other countries. Young maids with few or no free days have nearly zero chance of having a social life, let alone having a serious relationship and thinking about marriage. Some maids are already married in their countries and have to abandon spouses and children to earn a more decent living in affluent Singapore. In brief, maids are expected to help Singaporean families by renouncing to their own families or the possibility of having one.

But of course there is a simple solution to all this. Do you want to have a developed country without the underdeveloped countries’ problems? Then apply developed countries solutions.

In affluent countries, a migrant receives a basic salary exactly the same as nationals would get and enjoy the same rights as nationals do. They are also part of the Social Security system and enjoy free medical care. Soon they start saving and can buy a car to move around and rent an apartment to live in. In some months they can even bring their families and their children will be able to study in regular schools side by side with the rest of the children of that country.

This is the way to avoid, foreign workers transported like cattle in trucks, having them living in crowded dormitories and avoid having them looking for love in the wrong places.

This is also the understanding of the church: Migrants should enjoy the same rights as the natives of the country where they are migrating and they should be able to bring their families to live with them.

But, of course, that is costly. It is much more profitable to keep first world standard by paying foreign workers third world salaries. That is not only totally unjust, but simply an unfair way of developing. It is like cheating in a race for development at the expenses of foreign workers.

To top it all, some people are not only ignoring and avoiding the thorny issue of just development, they want the impossible: workers working for them, but not living near them. This is not only unfair and inhumane; it is simply unreasonable.

St. Monica

Holiness can be a contagious disease and the family is the best place to be contaminated. St. Monica and St. Augustine are just one example.

21st Monday of the Year

Jesus scolded and accused the group of the Pharisees of blindness (Mt 23:13-22). The Pharisees failed to see because they kept gazing at their navels. It was a community enclosed in themselves. They worried about how to get more followers, they were obsessed with their individual perfection, and they worried about how to get money, from the temple, from the altar…

In contrast, Paul commended the community of Thessalonica. Their love was constantly increasing. They were persecuted and they suffered, but they didn’t complain about God’s unfairness. Instead, St. Paul saw in that persecution, a sign of God’s just judgment.

They did not pray to be spared the sufferings. Instead they longed to remain faithful: “that our God may make you worthy of His calling and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith” (2 Th 1:11). It was not a community of navel gazers, but focused outside, looking ahead to their mission in the midst of the world.

21st Sunday of the year

Whom would you leave the keys to your house to? Or, whom would you entitle to do things in your name? How would you choose someone you trust enough to give your email-passwords and everything that belongs to you?

God is ready to give the key to the gate of Jerusalem. Those were heavy keys one had to carry on the shoulder. The keys to the “kingdom of heaven” will be even heavier. Jesus cannot entrust those keys to anyone. They are the keys that entrusted the power to bind and unbind, to tie and to loose. In other words, to act in the name of God.

That is serious. Other religions celebrate that God gave them a “sacred book”, still they are “alone” as to how to interpret it, how to make decisions that educate their communities, etc. Our God has given, not only his wisdom “trapped” in a book, but  also the ”keys” to act in His name. A very trusting God indeed.

No wonder St. Paul marvelled at God’s wisdom, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are His judgments and how unsearchable His ways!”(Rm 11:33)

Wasting our lives: Monday of the 5th week

I have just finished preaching about today’s gospel, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10:39). Basically, I compared life with money. If you save it, it devaluates. If you invest it, it increases in value. So we need to be very careful and choose what is really worth investing in our lives.

After reading the good news of the gospel, I have the habit of reading the “other news”, the newspaper. In the article “Marry now? It’s quite contrary.”, Tessa Wong ponders on how the median age of marriage has been raised in the past few years. Should someone marry early, like they used to do, or just delay the big date for better seasons?

Her answer is a reaction to a young mother who married early. To this lady, motherhood has changed her life drastically. Now her blog has “tediously boring updates about picking up kids from school and cooking dinners for six.” According to the writer, “that happens when you have kids before you turn 30.”

In other words, according to the wise advice of our author, if you have boring entries in your blog, your life is worthless. But did she ask this “boring” mother, whether it is all worthy? Is an apparently monotonous life the criteria to determine what is world pursuing, what gives true meaning to our lives?

I truly hope that the young journalist’s blog is excillarating and that one day, when she looks back at her life, she truly thinks that having being entertained was worth her life-time. I think that the young mother of boring blog-entries finds more fulfilment in her life, devoted to real loved ones in the apparent monotony of a daily life, than if she spent her days writing juicy blog entries to satisfy someone else’s thirst for entertainment.

Perhaps, deep meaning, daily commitment, fidelity and constancy, do not make impressive blog entries, but do feed human life with true meaning. Perhaps, Jesus is right, if you lose your life and invest it in others, you will find it!

We will resume in July!

After 5 intensive months of daily postings, much uncertainty and a great deal of learning, we will take our home leave. Hopefully, a time of reflection is also good to try to think of ways of improving this weblog.

God bless!

fr david

8th Wednesday of the year

“Jesus summoned them and said to them, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt.” (Mk 10:42)

We are so used to reading this passage that we hardly realise how revolutionary it can be for people who hear it for the first time. While everyone recognizes the value of service, most people naturally look at ruling as a more desirable thing to possess.

Leadership can be both dominion or service. Dominion, in the sense of becoming a lord (dominus) over the other does not make much sense. A fight for more dominion brings only suspicion and brings antagonism. It also brings anxiety since power is a difficult thing to hold on to, when it is desired by so many.

Once we have discovered that there’s only one Lord (dominus), it is an absolute injustice to try to become a lord to the other. Discovering that there is only one Lord equals to discovering that we are all servants, and therefore, equal in dignity. Human rights can only be guaranteed with that assurance in mind. Only where we are all equal in dignity, can we have peace and harmony.

Evidently, only when we are all servants, leadership becomes a kind of service and not a kind of dominion.

Translation of St. Dominic

Today we celebrate the translation of St. Dominic. It has nothing to do with languages. We celebrate that on May 24, 1233, the relics of St. Dominic.

Before he died, he expressed his wish to be buried “at the feet of the brothers”. According to his wishes, he was buried at the entrance of the church. Those wishes were very pious but not very practical. The tomb was soon covered with rain, snow and mud, so the friars decided to move the remains to the new Church.

This translation gave new momentum to St. Dominc’s process of canonization. The brothers feared that unearthing the body will discourage devotion to St. Dominic because of the presence of the smell and sight of the corrupting body. They were all surprised when they found the body incorrupt and a pleasant aroma invaded the Church and lingered long afterwards.

7th Friday of Easter

At the end of Easter, the liturgy gives us a reading of profound Easter connotation. The three times Peter refused to acknowledge that he knew the Lord are now overcome and superseded by the three “I love you” that Jesus provokes from of Peter. The weakness, the inconsistency, the fear is overcome by grace, “Feed my sheep”, and followed by a call, “Follow me”.

This is in a nutshell what Easter is all about. Peter was the same person before and after Jesus’ resurrection. However, after the resurrection something had happened to him. He is reconciled by the only one who could reconcile him, Jesus himself.

This reconciliation is not ignoring Peter’s weakness or forgetting Peter’s denials. It is above all assuming and restoring. Assuming the consequences of the fault (Jesus accepted the consequences of this denial by dying on the cross) and also restoring the person by replacing betrayal with fidelity.

At the end of this one more Easter season we are still called by the Lord “to follow him” like Peter. Follow him to accept the consequences of our wrong choices and called to be effectively restored back to faithfulness.

Daily Wisdom

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

Antoine de St. Exupéry