Like a little child

And so I have reached the end of a fast-flowing, ever-changing and full year. The year 2018 has been wonderful and horrible in parts, full of joy and laughter, but also tears and mourning. In short, it was a good year.

It is therefore fitting to end the year in the spirit of Christmas, which means to rejoice at the hope of my salvation, and the joy of the Word made flesh. Jesus is born, not just over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, but today, in my heart, and as a child of God, and Bride of Christ, I give thanks that light and joy are my inheritance. I can, therefore, be joyous even in trials, and I think I have managed to lift up and lighten dark moments in the last year; bringing peace and harmony where it is needed. 

Certainly I can do better, and I would like to think that all my tears of frustration and pain shed over the months have borne fruit, given me wisdom and new insights while enriching the tapestry of my life, making it more beautiful and pleasurable to my Father. 

Just observing how the little grandson has been growing has been educational. No wonder Jesus tells us to be like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. J simply is, and because he just is, he is a delight. He is a truly happy baby, full of curiosity and awe at the world around him. He brings joy because he smiles with such sweetness and laughs with such unrestrained glee. He does not acknowledge failure and the countless times he stumbles or falls on his tiny bottom despite wanting to stand up does not deter his indefatigable spirit. He knows what he wants and likes, and communicates it quite clearly. He has no filters and when he shows affection it feels as if you have won a prize for you know it is genuine, unadulterated love. He is joy personified. Aside from learning about joy, freedom, contentment, wonder, curiosity, perseverance and love from him, I have watched his teething pains with interest. 

First of all, teething pains are real and truly a pain. They cause great discomfort and happen from time to time as his little teeth erupt from the gums. So the truth is that growing up and growing involves pain, and it is not a one-shot deal but a process of a lifetime, so it seems.

Growing pains are part and parcel of life no matter what stage of life we are in. Even when we reach adulthood we never stop growing, one hopes not just sideways, but also in our dreams and aspirations as well as our mental and emotional maturation.  

So to expect life to be painless is unrealistic for the dynamism inherent in living, both the biological and metaphysical aspects require us to struggle and evolve all the time. Do not run from the pain, neither obsess about or wallow in it, but accept it as part of the process and mine the wisdom all painful experiences offer. The pain will pass as my father used to say. Instead, find the joy in the pain, the little treasures of pure gold. As my SD told me this year: make it a joyful love, not a painful or difficult love, even when loving cuts you to the core. This is one of my nuggets from 2018.

Loving the people around me deeply and wholeheartedly can be painful at times, but I can choose to respond in an easy and joy-filled manner. 

I can choose to bring a comforting peace into fear and sorrow; walk always towards the light of Christ and be the witness of light rather than be defeated by the surrounding darkness.

I can choose to turn the other cheek in conflict, forgive and bring harmony rather than a harsh justice to the situation. Being right isn’t everything, but being loving is. 

I can choose to die to my hurts and fears and act inspired by the Holy Spirit. Mercy is the water and fertiliser needed to bring about new life where only barrenness was found. 

I can choose to be patient and assiduous in my efforts, allowing God to come into the dead spaces to breathe His brand of mysterious miracles, making the impossible possible. Wait on Him, even if it takes years...

I do not know what the new year holds but I do know that joy will feature a great deal. I will live as Baby J does, knowing I am greatly loved and trusting fully in the goodness of God as demonstrated by the people around me. I thank God for all I have received in this year, the very many gifts, and I await with eagerness the new year. 

Immanuel

Who has Jesus been for you this Advent? A question asked at last night’s reflection before midnight mass. The last half of Advent has been a period of inner struggle, of trying to make peace with the realities I am facing, of preparing my heart to make a home worthy of the Christ child to be born in. I felt I was somewhat lacking in charity, my efforts at being a good Christian disciple lacklustre. I was truly in darkness. I just couldn’t see the gold from the dross. So who has Jesus been for me? He is the light, of course.

I was reminded just before Christmas who He was when T asked me what my favourite Scriptural verse was. This popped into my head Isaiah 61:10 (I was actually trying to remember Isaiah 54:2). Never one to remember references well I was intrigued. When I looked in the Bible this was what I found:  

I delight greatly in the Lord;

    my soul rejoices in my God.

For he has clothed me with garments of salvation

    and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness,

as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,
 and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

That is right. He is also my Bridegroom, even though He is the Suffering Servant, and the invitation to follow Him requires me to suffer at times. I had forgotten to rejoice so focused was I on my difficulties. I had forgotten I was loved greatly in my attempts to love others. I had lost the joy. I could only see the shadows. I was living in the shadows.

Recently I watched an Inspired video shared by D on Facebook that showed colour-blind people who first saw in colour. Their reactions was immense joy that often brought them to tears. Their delight was palpable. I was reminded this was me when I first encountered Jesus in an up close and personal fashion. Jesus was my vision. He gave me the ability to see in colour and it was, is, truly amazing. 

I was also reminded that despite my deep happiness and contentment at my first homecoming, taking up my cross and following Him has not an easy process through the years, but it was, still is, worth it. Today I KNOW I still want to follow Him, but in order to do so, there will still be sacrifices to be made, and the path marked out is tricky and occasionally devilish. And yet, the view continues to enthrall. 

Just as my eyes are attracted to the delicate beauty of the weeds I find on my rambles, and I delight in the colour and symmetry of the unremarkable and the common, I can do the same wth whatever life throws at me. There is joy in the pain, great beauty in the loving, poetry in the brokenness. I just need to train my eyes on the precious baby wrapped in swaddling, resting on the hay in the smelly manger surrounded by livestock. He is my treasure!

No matter how dark the valley may be at times, the Christ child, Immanuel, God is with us, is with me. He and His inestimable mother Mary and stalwart earthly father Joseph walk with me. Christmas is here, and my soul rejoices.

Our Lady’s blessings

P and I were in Chiang Mai and it was a wonderful break from our usual routine. The weather was ideal for walking, sunny yet cool and dry, and in the evenings, the temperature dipped further. So we did a fair amount of walking, together with the requisite eating and shopping.

Again we were blessed to have a church nearby to attend mass. I was pleasantly surprised to bump into Father Olivier last Sunday at the Sacred Heart Cathedral. Father O was my SD when I went for my silent retreat at Seven Fountains some years back. Thus my memories of Chiang Mai are always coloured by Jesus, for in this place He spoke to me so vividly and lovingly all those years ago. 

On this trip, P and I have experienced the Lord’s blessings, not just in our sumptuous accommodation (many thanks to P’s Chairman for her generosity), but also His protective hand when we trekked around Doi Inthanon National Park, enjoying the beauty of nature. 

We celebrated two years of marriage yesterday and I have a sense of deep gratitude for Mother Mary’s gentle guidance and protection. Consecrating ourselves and our marriage to her was the best thing we ever did for she has helped us along the rapids of marriage, easing the pain of misunderstanding and miscommunication, while enabling us to build stronger bonds through the days and weeks of living, loving and laughing together.

Loving is not always easy. Much as we desire the good of the other, we invariably end up hurting the other at times. The only way we can move forward unhampered by past blunders and failings is to seek with sincere hearts to first love Jesus before we try to love each other. Somehow this intention is important for it is only through the Lord we are able to renew ourselves individually, and subsequently, the marriage of two become one. 

The sacramental nature of marriage is the supernatural glue that unifies two very different people by dissolving all the inevitable pain and frustration suffered, while binding and healing bruised hearts, fashioning them into a whole that speaks of God’s true nature to the world, love, in the very fundamental and vital vocation of marriage. 

Mother Mary has brought us time and again back to her Son, and she has whispered words of wisdom, urging us to deeper intimacy with each other despite our fears and baggage. She has taught us to walk softly and hold each other’s heart with open, gentle and forgiving hands. She is our Mother guiding us forward to embrace our mutual vocation of marriage with joyful resolve.

As we continue to walk forward, we do so, hand in hand, hearts entwined. We thank Our Lady of Guadalupe. who is our Patroness as we were married on her Feast Day. for inviting us into her womb that we may be born anew together with Her Son, incarnating Him to each other and to the world around us.  

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Mother most dear

Blessed Virgin Mary

Pure of heart and mind

Conceived immaculately

The perfect vessel

Full of grace

Epitome of receptivity 

Thank you Mother Mary

Your unrelenting yes and

Your gentle heart transforms me

You have taught me to ponder more

Seek softer ways to act:

Righteousness wrapped in compassion

Goes down a treat like honey

Easy on the ears, spreading joy

Simply good for the soul

No wonder many have found their way

To Jesus through Mary

The radiant light of the moon

Humbly I ask:

Mary, Mother of Jesus,

Please be a Mother to me

So I can be an awesome child of God.

Anticipating Advent

The word advent is defined as coming into a place, view or being; arrival. For Christians, Advent is the season before Christmas, about a month of preparation and waiting expectantly, not just to celebrate the birth of the Christ child in the world, but also to mark the return of Jesus in the Second Coming. 

The first exhortation is stay awake, for we do not know the hour the Son of Man is coming. We are close to the end of the calendar year, where spirits tend to flag, and we may have lost a little of our zeal to bring God glory, weighed down by our recent failures and our own self-indulgent ways, so the liturgical wisdom of Advent is timely. Wake up from our distractions, prepare our hearts to receive Jesus, allow Him to be born within us in new ways. 

Physical and mental exhaustion have left me in a rather blasé state of mind, so I welcomed Advent with hope; hope for my own renewal of spirit, hope to release my disordered attachments to the Lord, and hope to be restored to Righteous Peace and Godly Glory promised in Baruch chapter five, verses one to nine. 

The readings at mass have been rich, brimming with God’s true intention for humanity: the physical and spiritual healings, the miraculous feeding of the hungry thousands, the reminders of how much God loves us all and how He wants to shower us with blessings. We need only turn around and return into His loving arms to experience all His promises.

Certainly it can be a mite challenging to do just that, return to Him, stay awake and hope for a better day tomorrow when our hearts are aching with sorrow and loss, and we feel battered down by life and all the evil we seem to be surrounded by, and yet, this is the true beauty of being Christian, we have an ace in the hole in the Christ baby. 

He will be born to share in our humanity wholly, experiencing all we ourselves experience. He will take on all our failures and sins by the horns and fling them where they don’t matter one smidge, and we will be rewarded with a redemption that wraps us in loving arms and unifies us with our Maker. We will live forever in glory, beyond the limitations of our current existence.

Advent encourages me to think with that long term view of eternal bliss and to transform my heart and mind now such that I can experience a foretaste of future glory by living as closely as I can with Jesus in the here and now. This intimate relationship with the Lord is what will give me the ability to be alert and not falter presently, to be one with Him in heart, mind and soul. 

We will pass this way but once, YOLO as it is often tossed around, so make it a great life, a great day every day, live as Jesus did, in close communion with the Father, acting with righteousness and compassion to all He met, with no exception. There are great rewards for doing so, not just in the future, but even now.  

So heed the call and act on it. Shake off the tiredness of body and heaviness of heart and serve with enthusiasm and good cheer. He was, is, and always will be our Saviour King, God who is with us. Welcome Him come Christmas Day with grateful hands and a joyful heart.

Humble, awesome pastors

I attended Father Gerard Keane’s funeral mass last Friday afternoon and it hit me emotionally without me quite understanding why. I didn’t know Father Keane that well but he is the last of a group of Irish Jesuits who were the mainstay of the Church of Saint Ignatius during my formative years. I would say my faith and spirituality has been shaped a fair bit by the succinct and reflective sermons of this particular cohort of Jesuit priests that spoke of God’s mercy and forgiveness to me.

He was the last of this cohort of Irish men who gave their lives over to God in order to pastor sheep in a foreign land, making this land so unlike their native land a home. With Father K’s demise, I feel as if a precious piece of my childhood is gone forever and that saddens me. Those were days of innocence and a mundane, much simpler existence. And yet, the fruitfulness Father Christopher spoke of remains although the man has departed. He and his brethren have made many of us Singaporeans devout Catholics who understand the joy of being God’s children. They have given us a sense of belonging. We have experienced a gentle, loving Father’s guidance in our lives. We have sought Him in the silent landscapes of our hearts and met Him. We have found Him in all things, especially the humble, very human man Father K was, who had a heart set on His Father’s heart.

Just this morning I awoke to news that Father Ignatius Huan had lost his battle with cancer in the wee hours of the morning. Again I am saddened greatly. Having had to privilege over the years to attend retreats and seminars facilitated by Father Ignatius, I feel the loss of this humble, gentle, and wise priest. He was such a wonderful teacher and a great example of a man who walked to the beat of the Lord’s drum. He gave me heart to walk the narrow path and be a powerful witness, a sign of contradiction in today’s world: to love as Jesus loved without caring if everyone else thought I am foolish or overly rigid to follow the precepts of Mother Church so wholeheartedly.

In the climate of paedophile priests and priests who behave without integrity and Christian love, I salute priests like Father Keane and Father Ignatius, and I thank God for their lives which have been poured out as an offering to Him. These are men who put their talents to good use, never allowing pride to affect their judgement, and who remained level-headed and humble. They went boldly where few would have trodden. There were huge sacrifices and immense personal costs they undertook willingly. Lonely days and nights were a surety. They were His missionary disciples who have transformed the world and made it a better place. Good and faithful servants!

Thank you dear Father Keane and Father Ignatius. Rest in peace, in eternal rest and perpetual light. Till we meet again.