bukas palad: July 2006

In a few hours' time, Jesuits and friends, here in Manila, will gather for the Eucharist to celebrate St Ignatius of Loyola's feast day, which is actually tomorrow, 31 July. Happy Feast Day, everyone!

This year's festivities will commemorate the Jubilee Year of the First Jesuit companions: we gratefully recall and celebrate the giftedness of Sts Ignatius and Francis Xavier and Bl Peter Faber to each other, first Jesuit companions, and to the Church and its mission of making the world more human and more divine.

Each of the first companions teaches us something of that very Ignatian theme in the Spiritual Exercises, "finding God in all things." With Ignatius, we learn that God is indeed always with us, labouring for our good, and, hence, it is indeed right and good for us to imitate His Love in service to all. With Francis, we find that it right to dream big dreams for God and to make them come true, especially for the less fortunate. And with Peter, we appreciate the very ordinary act of walking with another in life, through mutual care and spiritual concern, and together make the Good News alive in the here and now.

Perhaps, today's occasion is also as good a time as any for us to ponder reflectively on the meaning of friendship.

Ignatius, Francis and Peter were a motley crew, housemates studying together in Paris. Theirs was a coming together not of their own accord but of God's good humour for his ever-greater plan. Living together, they struggled with each other's idiosyncracies, as they also relished communal joys. And, like the comforting, familiar and reassuring feel we have when wearing a favourite shirt or resting in a favourite reading chair, they "grew" on each other, becoming companions who shared life's travails and faith's consolations. Theirs was a life-giving, life-affirming friendship that led them to indeed find God in all things, and thereafter to a life of service for God's greater glory, both in mission and in small things.

Isn't their experience of friendship in the Lord of all things true of our own experiences of companionship in the family or religious community, at the workplace, with friends? Don't we find ourselves in discord, sometimes, and, at other times, in harmony? Yet are we not nourished each time we come together, enlivening another's day or carrying the other's load? Are these spaces we inhabit not also communions where more than life is being played out, where in fact we are invited into companionship with each other, and, in this way, affirm and give life?

And in all this, do we not somehow have that sense of our good God as companion too--here, in our midst, participating in our ordinary everydayness as He accompanies and celebrates fully the gift of Life with us?

For all the friendships we share, Deo gratias!

Well, I've taken the plunge...stepped over the ravine...made that leap into the world of blogging. Some of you will say, "Finally!" (Did I hear a "phew! it's about time!" from one of you?)

To be honest, I've always wanted to do this, blog, that is. But long have I procastinated. My Aunt Beatrice would say, "it's so you...always taking your time!" But there's a reason, and it has to do with the right name for a blog.

I'd always thought something like Into the Wind or Into His Whispering Silence would be so apt: it captures everything about faith and mission and God. Wouldn't these be the right things to write about by one who is preparing to preach the Good News? After all, practice makes perfect, they say. (The Jesuit in me nods approvingly!)

But, in recent weeks, these titles didn't seem to fit in with what I've long been envisioning for this space.

Strangely, perhaps, providentially, bukas palad came to mind one morning. It came to me as my mind wandered in prayer.

"Bukas palad...bukas palad...bukas palad...." The phrase kept resonating within me, like a good refrain from a familiar and memorable jazz song of my yesteryear. Like the haunting tune that Ella sings (even now as I close my eyes, I remember), "bukas palad" seduced me, holding me in its embrace, never letting me forget that all that I am ought to be shared.

Bukas palad, a beautiful Filipino phrase for open hands. It speaks of generosity: one shares the little or much one first received gratuitously with another because the other is just there, before you, inviting you to give.

But "bukas palad" expresses humility too, for it whispers the truer reality for one who chooses to write for an audience. The author stands before the face of the reader, and the face of God too, laying bare his very being, all one's joys and struggles, all one's pains and hopes. Indeed, to be "bukas palad" is to do nothing less than to enact a kenosis of self in hopeful trust that the other one gives oneself to will celebrate the gifts shared. Perhaps, then, the other will reciprocate in a sharing of himself too.

What can come out of an act of "bukas palad" is nothing less than fidelity and celebration, a fidelity of celebrating life, love and faith shared together.

And, it is with this hopeful faith that I now embark on this blog. Welcome!

bukas palad

with open hands, we give what we have first received. and with open hands, we receive what we will divest, once again. this is blessing itself: the giving and receiving of life and love, the sharing of faith and God.

Celebrating friendship

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Beginnings...at the root of it all

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