Aqua vitae

Over 70 per cent of the earth is covered in it. Seventy per cent of our bodies consist of it.

Without it, all living forms cannot grow and eventually die. Life only begins when it is present.

It cleanses, refreshes, even brings healing.

Beyond the physiological level, it is a gift of the Spirit, a gift that in baptism we are purified and reborn into new life.

What an unimaginably precious gift water is in all its rich nuances of meaning and yet, we often take for granted, misuse, and even abuse this gift.

Like the woman at the well, we have been given living water that will become “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” inside each of us.

However, very often our thirst for God takes us away from Him rather than toward Him for our senses and our intellect tell us that the other alternatives are more attractive.

Unless we are able to seek within, this thirst will never be slaked. Instead we become slave to things, people and ideas, finding temporal happiness but not much inner peace, driven on by our unquenchable needs, subsisting only on a primal level.

We become superstitious, idol-worshippers, spiritually bound by the walls of our worldly beliefs, living dependent "lives of quiet desperation" but convincing ourselves we are living the dream.

When the waters grow muddy. we lose the ability to see with supernatural clarity and eventually treat this baptismal gift as a mirage, a tantalizing but capricious figment of imagination.

To come to the spring within requires first the recognition and acceptance of self, of who I am.

Together with an openness of heart and mind to Jesus and a faith-filled imagination to see beyond what is perceived as reality, we can be transformed.

Just as the woman at the well was.

Now this is not a one-off, chance occurrence but something that can happen again and again in our lives , IF we allow it.

Today’s gospel reminds me of the importance of drinking regularly from the waters of life: to meet Jesus where I am and sit quietly, replete with His transforming love.

So if you're thirsty, travel inside and treat yourself to some living water. Satisfaction is guaranteed.

Love and marriage

Just yesterday, I chatted with two friends in the course of my day and one asked me whether I wanted to get married while the other asked if I had met that special someone yet?

I have to admit that the concept of marriage has popped up in my consciousness a fair bit recently and I have been reflecting on what it means in my current state of singlehood.

Coincidentally, I had spent the morning watching Christopher West’s Created and Redeemed on Living the “Great Mystery” of Marriage.

Watching the DVD helped me understand the longings of my heart for each of us is created for marriage, to be in union with "Christ the Bridegroom", who out of deep love wants to "‘impregnate’ us with divine life.”

Can I, as a single, live out marriage vows and experience Christ’s love as “free, total, faithful and fruitful”?

Having received the complete gift of Christ’s love, who laid down His life for me of His own volition so that I can live life to the fullest, I am learning to reciprocate that love and in turn, love Him in a manner that is “free, total, faithful and fruitful”, which, incidentally, is what couples pledge each other in the sacramental vows of marriage on their wedding day.

While I lack the physical presence of a husband, and at times wish that I had someone to cuddle just before I fall asleep, I can honestly say that I do not want for much at this point in my life. Even the occasional jagged edge of loneliness is smoothed over by spending time with Jesus.

Abraham Maslow found that humans have an instinctual need to make the most of their unique abilities, to self-actualize and be the best they can be once they had satisfied all their physiological needs.

Viktor Frankl took the concept of self-actualization one step further and posited that self-actualization is merely a side effect of self-transcendence, for our search for meaning in life takes us outside ourselves and our psyches into the world.

Falling in love (when self-transcendence becomes an actuality) with Jesus has led me to seek beyond my own needs and wants. And being faithful to Him means being faithful to His vision of life here on earth: to love others as He has loved and continues to love me -with a love that is unconditional, tender, compassionate and boundless.

Secure in His embrace, I am content, at peace with myself and brimming with inner joy. For what matters most in my life is His happiness and in seeking to please Him as a bride pleases her bridegroom, and vice versa.

Ain't love grand?

Forty days

There is a common trait in my family that I suspect runs in many families.

We tend to get impatient with the people that mean the most to us and end up speaking in curt tones to one another, saying things that hurt the other.

Why do we do it when we claim to love members of our family dearly? There is no reason on this planet to treat another human being without respect or basic courtesy, much less one who is loved.

The haunting lyrics of Alicia Keys's song Like you'll never see me again are an apt reminder:

"I don’t wanna forget the present is a gift
And I don’t wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me
‘Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed"

As she cautions in the song, don't wait until you lose it to know what love really is.

While it can be pleasant to reminisce about the past and to dream about the future, we live in the present and should therefore recognize its import and the impact our actions have living each moment of the present.

"The challenge of Lent is to recognize the place good things have in our lives and not be addicted to them," said Fr. Romeo during his homily yesterday.

Just as a disproportionate amount of attention on the "good things" is bad, so is a total lack of appreciation for them.

He went on to say that our biggest temptations came not from our weaknesses but from our strengths.

We can be tempted to be arrogant in our intelligence. Likewise, we can be tempted to discount and even abuse the bonds of love we have been blessed with in our relationships.

The central message of Lent is to renew our hearts and renew the way we live our lives. Refresh our relationships, not just with Jesus in our personal prayer time, but also with others, in order to enrich the relationship we each have with Him. For we cannot profess to love Christ if we do not love one another.

Just as we spring-clean our houses during the Lunar New Year, so must we spring-clean our hearts and minds.

It is said that it takes 21 days to form a habit. During Lent, we are given 40 days to change the way we normally lead our lives and enter Easter transformed by this season of grace.

So don't let the time go by unmarked. Make a change in the way you normally live your life today.

World views

As our last W2W meeting we were discussing how we viewed five areas of our lives - self, life, others, the world and God. (We are in the middle of John Powell's The Fully Alive Experience.)

My vision of the world scored really high for I saw the world as a beautiful place that God had created. When M. shared that she couldn't score that section and that she thought she ultimately saw the world as a scary, frightening place it got me thinking.

She is not wrong. Look at the fighting and unrest going on in the world. The mindless violence. Multitudes of people being abused, oppressed and killed. Disasters of all manner you read about in the newspaper every morning. The world IS a grim place.

So have I hardened my heart so that I am inured to the horrors of the world? Or am I myopic and cannot see beyond my nose and hence live life cocooned in my own little world?

I suspect I am guilty of both instances at times and can only pray that they are few and far between.

However, I also choose to see the glory of a sunrise breaking over the distinctive skyline, the graceful beauty of the trees that grow outside my window, or the elegance of herons wading in the canal in the cool dawn air as the world that God made and the world that man has contributed in adorning.

All the ugliness and the suffering to be found are mainly man-ufactured and have little to do with the world we have been tasked to be stewards of, a world that evolves and surprises as it revolves around a primordial cycle of its own.

There is, of course, an inherent fragility in life. Everything ages as time passes. People, animals, plants, fall sick and die. Death cannot be denied, or explained at times. But that's what makes life, the world, even more poignantly glorious. The transience of natural law that can be cause for sorrow and celebration simultaneously.

The world we live in cannot be a perfect place - we already know that as paradise was lost due to the disobedience of the first humans. It will only come to perfection when we are reunited with Jesus beyond death. Or when we choose to live out God's will in our lives and the beatitudes Jesus gave in His sermon on the mount.



So let us honour the world we have been given and make it a better place by staying focused on God and never losing hope; being poor in spirit, pure of heart and compassionate, principled kingdom-builders.

Consequently, if we learn to view the world through Christ's eyes, maybe the world won't seem so scary after all.