1. And so it has come to pass that after nine months of quiet expectation and a few days more of anxious delay, Geri and Ken's first child, a son, was born at 8.05pm. They have named him Glenn.

    Speaking to a very tired mother and a most elated father last night, I felt their overwhelming happiness and delight. My sister and my brother-in-law’s longing for a child has been fulfilled. Mom’s joy too is profound, as is her relief that Geri had a safe delivery. Everyone in the family is beaming in the goodness of this gift of new life in our midst. Indeed, he is a happy sight to finally behold.

    He is a handsome baby—Carl said ecstatically over the phone—as he should be, named as he is for the quiet but assuring spirit of comfort and rest his name promises for all who seek.

    There were times yesterday when I was anxious, particularly as it took Glenn more than 10 hours after the first contractions to enter the world hale and hearty. At times like this, I do find it tough being far from home as a religious missioned to work overseas. Yet time and distance diminished when news of Glenn’s birth crackled over the phone: for that one shinning moment, I felt present with everyone back home, sharing in this most grace-filled event.

    My prayer before sleeping last night was one of immense gratitude for God’s goodness and kindness to Geri and Ken and the family. Indeed, God has unveiled his countenance in the face of this new born babe. God has made real his faithfulness to all of us, not only to mother and father and family but to friends and others who will hear this news and remember that His Love is always with us. We can recall this truth because each new birth originates in love, as the future of each new born babe is always nourished by and realized in the love of parents and family, and all these human acts of loving do nothing more than re-create Divine Love in our midst.

    In Glenn’s birth, God reminds us too that the gift of life is itself, paradoxically, the most precious and the most mysterious of human experiences. No matter how much medical science and biology class can explain conception, gestation and birth, they can never account for the basis of human existence with absolute certainty. Yet, Philosophy has helped me appreciate that we exist because our being in the world, and in relation to one another, is itself the gift of being from the One whose Being simply is. And as I think of my own life, and of Glenn’s that will unfold in the coming years, I cannot help but appreciate this gift of being as an invitation to emulate, as best as we can, and precisely because of the finite reality we inhabit, the One whose Being we are freely bestowed with. Indeed, it is because of this gift that each of us will always experience in daily life the wonder of new life beginning and new life coming into its fullness in time.

    As I write this, I find myself thinking ahead to the many and real possibilities awaiting Glenn as he matures. These are possibilities each of us in his life—parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, friends—is now being invited to help him discover and actualize in the reality of this one time and space we have, human existence, as we know it.

    This invitation speaks to me of accompanying Glenn and the new family his coming to be has brought to life, always, even as the reality of my Jesuit vocation can mean being apart from them for many years. It is however in the sharing of life as family that we are never apart, always near and dear. And nothing reminds me better of being family than God’s own faithful companionship in the family we are.

    Welcome to the family, my nephew!

    photo by anne geddes

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  2. Two recent interactions with the poor, who often come to our community seeking help, left me greatly disturbed, as they also distressed me much that I cannot do enough to uplift their lot in life.

    Whenever I reflected on these in the past few weeks, I found myself returning to this realization: if I am to really and meaningfully accompany them, it must be in small, personal and concrete ways—listening to their plight; giving them some food and drink; placing a few pesos in their empty hands when an emergency arises. Though simple acts, these somehow affirm the hope they already have and cling to with great faith. Seeing their hope is always instructive for me.

    Allow me to share these incidents with you.

    The first incident: Carlos buries his brother.

    Carlos is one of the many poor that come every now and then to Arrupe. Slow in mind and speech, highly anxious in action, and always dressed in soiled, stained clothes that reek of poverty, he comes primarily to ask for financial help to buy medicine for his aged and sickly mother and his bed-ridden brother, Jose. Listening to the same stories he tells each time, I feel for this man whose efforts to make ends meet for the very basics in life—food, shelter, medical care—result more often than not in the grim reality that he will never have enough.

    A week ago, he came with news that Jose had died, alone and in pain, his body ravaged by diabetes-related complications. There was nothing he or his mother could do in the final hours but sit and await Death to claim Jose.

    He came not only to inform but in hope to ask for help: he needed to raise 9,000 pesos (SGD$300) for a coffin for Jose and the cemetery plot to bury him in. As religious, we do not have that amount of money in our pockets. At home, Jose’s body lay in a makeshift coffin of wooden planks hastily put together by his neighbours who worried about the decomposition that was fast setting in because there was no money to embalm the body, he said amid sobs. I gave him what I could: a few hundred pesos to get him by, thinking this was the best I could do.

    After expressing his gratitude, he surprised me when he suggested I say a prayer for Jose and the family. I was taken aback; I had not anticipated this. He insisted, adding that a prayer would be more than enough. So, we said the prayer together, in a mix of English and Filipino, offering thanks for Jose’s life and asking for God’s mercy, as well as for God’s blessings of peace and comfort on him and his mother.

    When we ended our prayer, he clasped my hands, repeatedly saying, “maraming salamat, po! This is good enough.” I inquired about the additional money he had to raise; he was sure that he would find it somehow. As I watched him walk down the slope from our front door, his shoulders stopping, I could not help but wonder if our prayer together gave him more than enough hope to bury Jose in peace.

    The second incident: Aris, the detergent packets and his baby daughter.

    Aris is not like the other poor who come to our house. He does not beg for food or money. He sells detergent to raise the money he needs to buy milk for his eight-month old baby daughter. Each packet costs 60 pesos. For every packet sold, he earns a mere 7 pesos. In one week, he spends 250-500 pesos on powered milk for his baby; and this means selling a whole lot of detergent packets to have the resources to buy the milk tins. Unemployed, he and his wife are struggling to raise three children in a rented one-room space in a poor squatter area about 15 minutes away. I am inspired by his efforts to provide for his family and to preserve his dignity.

    We talked last Wednesday after I had bought the last three packets he had for our house. I found out that his baby daughter was not baptized. He told me that he needed to have 250 pesos for the parish priest to do the baptism. I was most upset and angry when I heard this; after all, isn’t it a priest’s obligation to baptize those who seek the faith gratuitously, especially, the poor? I found this news hard to swallow as one preparing for the priesthood.

    In seeking advice from an older, wiser priest, I learnt that it would not be so correct to simply find any priest to baptize Aris’ daughter, as I had thought possible: her baptism should be registered in a parish. While I agree with this, I felt aggrieved that the hierarchal Church, the face that we sometimes insist on projecting, can be so rigid and cold towards the poor who desire much to be embraced as part of same flock of God as you and me, only to encounter so many obstacles before them. If Jesus heard Aris’ predicament, I’d like to think that he would express his holy anger and dismay and remind us in no uncertain terms of the greater law of Love, as he did when he reminded the Pharisees of David’s act of feeding his hungry men with the loaves reserved for the priests in the house of God (Mark 2: 23-28).

    To Aris’ credit, he did not ask me to do anything about this state of affairs. He only wanted to share. As the evening set in while we talked on the benches outside Arrupe, I sensed that in sharing he found something, something real and palpable within his being to return home with the small earnings made and wait in hope for a time when there will be enough money to have his daugther baptized.

    Writing about these experiences, I recall Fr Pedro Arrupe’s thoughts on optimism and hope in One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey:

    I am quite happy to be called an optimist, but my optimism is not of the utopian variety. It is based on hope. What is an optimist? I can answer for myself in a very simple fashion: He or she is a person who has the conviction that God knows, can do, and will do what is best for mankind. This conviction is based on faith and charity. Because we believe that the Lord knows what is best for us, even though we ourselves do not know what it is; that he can do it because he is all powerful; and that he will do it because he loves us. This is the basis for that confidence which is related to hope, although theologically distinct from it, and which renders this hope shakeable. What the world needs most today is hope.

    I see this kind of optimism and hope abundantly present in Carlos, Aris and so many of the poor who come knocking at our door, and that I must honestly admit, I sometimes lack.

    It is instructive that a much needed lesson I am learning at this stage in formation is not to always dream big dreams of sallying forth into the great unknown to do only magnanimous things in God’s work but to be with people, particularly, the poor, and to help them realize God’s gift of hope in their lives as real, palpable and always present.

    This in itself is ministry: it is about working with God in small ways to uplift the spirit of all God's peoples so that all our lives can be transfigured to become good and beautiful as God had always planned for us.

    photos by myklmabalay

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  3. A few nights ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find an email from a good friend that I’d lost contact with since leaving Adelaide twelve years ago. I’d never expected to hear from Brynesy, especially as I’d tried to find him on my last visit to Australia before entering the Jesuits only to be told that he was in London.
    His brief lines were indeed a happy blast from the past. Reading his note, yesteryear memories of mateship (as the Aussies would say of good friendship) shared over coffee and curry, a BBQ or two, animated often by the mix of varying and congruent views on Literature and Critical Theory, life and faith, flooded my being. Needless to say, this left me with a happy buzz that evening. Like all good friends that find each other on the Net after years, I excitedly posted a few lines in reply on his website.
    Byrnesy’s surprise came with added delights. In the intervening years, he’d obtained his law degree, married and became a Dad! Indeed, much good has come his way since we last met. Looking at the photographs of him and his family on his webpage, I recognize a friend who has aged gracefully and happily. Needless to say, I am pleased for him. The tone of his note reassured me of a continuing sense of camaraderie, as it is a warm invitation to renewed communion in words and ideas, which first brought us together as friends in the English Department.
    As I pen these lines, I wonder about the other good friends I had in school and university, the army and at work, in Singapore and in Australia: where are they now? what are they doing? are they contentedly living the lives they’d hope to fashion for themselves? It would be so good to touch base with them again and to catch up on each other's lives.
    There are moments when I ask myself if it is possible to believe that the good friends we seem to have little or no contact with aren’t so very far away, lost in the wide blue yonder, as we often think. When I was seventeen and in CJC blue, I read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull in which these lines appear:
    If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?

    If I can recall the timbre of their voices, their funny smiles, their characteristic idiosyncracies, every once in awhile, between the Here and Now of my life, then they do reside with me in the everydayness of life. They’re never then far from the heart. Indeed, they’re always close enough to me to offer grateful thanks for all that they have shared in making me the person I am today.
    And I’d like to hope that one day, when I least expect it, we’ll bump into one another, somewhere, somehow, and reconnect, even if much has transpired in our individual lives in the interim. When that moment comes, I’ve no doubt we’ll have much to talk about, to laugh over and to celebrate.
    Is this possible? Why not: after all, good friends never disappear--they’re just hanging around waiting for the right moment to just be together.

    photo: david niblack
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  4. Today, Catholics worldwide celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord.

    In the Western Church, this solemnity dates from the fourth century. As we come to the end of the Christmas Season, it joyfully celebrates the manifestation of God’s living presence and power in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.

    With this solemnity, we especially commemorate the revelation of God’s gift of his Son to all the nations on earth, as represented by Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, the Three Wise Men or the Magi, who come to adore the Child Jesus. This event reminds us of God’s unexplainable but gratuitous love for peoples of every race, language and way of life to share in the gift of Jesus. Jesus is the gift of gifts that fulfills all human longing for eternity, accomplished through the salvific act of his death on the cross. The gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh that these learned kings bring portend this by identifying Jesus as the King of Kings who has dominion even over death.

    But there is something else that we can joyfully celebrate in today's solemnity. In my Philosophy class, I teach that the religious belief we profess is most fully realized when human reason and divine revelation come together in the believer. Today's remembrance of the Epiphany of the Lord affirms this: it is a proclamation that reminds us of God’s gifts of reason and revelation to the human person to help her discover her truest identity and to know her God more dearly.

    If the Visitation of the Shepherds reminds us that it is the humble of heart that first hear and respond to the Gift of God’s presence, the Adoration of the Magi reminds us of the necessary coupling of reason and revelation to answer the question the Wise Men pose: “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising…” (Mt:2:2). Both the human potential to use reason and the human capacity to humbly receive revelation are inextricably intertwined in aiding the human person find her God, which is so often a life-long journey of discovering and growing in one’s faith.

    But this faith is hardly the result of human effort alone. It is more correctly the happy fruit of humankind’s willingness to participate in the gift of faith in the One who first gives us existence and who we continually seek to encounter and know. We can do this because we always already possess this faith by virtue of our existence; it is a faith inherently manifest in our very being that is always conscious of the Absolute Other that we cannot envisage but whose face we desirously seek all the time in all things.

    Indeed, today’s Gospel reading from Matthew (2:1-12) presents us with the image of reason and revelation coming together in the journey of discovery the Magi undertake to follow the Star that leads them to a joyful face-to-face encounter with the Christ child. It is a journey that, in the end, however, can be completed only with the gift of faith.

    Using their skill and their science, the knowledge they already have and the new knowledge their intellect processes, the Magi reach Jerusalem. There the Star stops while these Gentiles consult the Jewish revelation to determine the route to their goal. This consultation with divine revelation, as it is manifest in the Jewish Torah, reminds us that reason alone cannot bring us finally to Christ. The revealed word enlightens and illuminates their movement onward. But the revealed word in and of itself seems insufficient as well, since the scribes who instruct the Magi do not themselves make the journey.

    In this, can Matthew’s eloquent narrative of this encounter between the learned and majestic kings and the humble and holy scribes also suggest to us that none of ours has it all together, but that together with God and with one another we have it all?

    Another aspect of our Christian Catholic faith permeates this wonderful event. At the heart of the story of the Adoration by the Magi is Jesus. Meeting Jesus, the hearts of the Magi are touched, moved and transformed from being merely human seekers for the unknown to becoming human persons who can now begin an inner journey of metanoia. A conversion of heart takes place and their very being is transfigured. They return home transformed. It is indeed significant that Matthew records the “different direction” the Magi take to go home. In the light of this encounter between humankind and the Divine in the person of Jesus, to take a different direction on one’s life journey suggests more than a mere navigational change: it intimates a change of heart.

    Pope Benedict XVI reflects on this encounter of the Magi with the Christ child when he spoke to the world's youth gathered for the World Youth Day festivities in Cologne in 2005 in this way:

    Now [the Magi] have to learn to give themselves—no lesser gift would be sufficient for this King. Now they have to learn that their lives must be conformed to this divine way of exercising power, to God’s own way of being.

    They must become men of truth, of justice, of goodness, of forgiveness, of mercy. They will no longer ask: how can this serve me? Instead they will have to ask: How can I serve God’s presence in the world? They must learn to lose their life and in this way to find it. Having left Jerusalem behind, they must not deviate from the path marked out by the true King, as they follow Jesus.

    Indeed, our own encounter with the Lord not only at Christmas and today but at every moment must lead us, like Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, men who show us that we too must open ourselves to reason and revelation, to acknowledge and celebrate this indubitable truth of our human identity and destiny: we are all called to be bearers of divine love to all Creation.

    This truth is the message of the Epiphany of the Lord. And, we can hear this more clearly and follow it more closely if we but admit that the human person is gifted with reason and revelation to realize her faith more truthfully.


    artwork: Adoration of the Magi, The Mosaics of Ravenna, Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo

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  5. Today is the first day of the New Year, 2007.

    Today, the Church’s calendar invites us to celebrate the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God and the Imposition of the Name of Jesus. In a very special way, Jesuits throughout the world will commemorate this Solemnity for it is also the titular feast of our religious congregation that bears the name of Jesus.

    In today’s Gospel reading from Luke (2:16-21), we read this line about the naming of Jesus: When the eighth day came and the child was to be circumcised, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception.

    Karl Rahner writes a beautiful meditation on this line, articulating the gift of Jesus as the gift of grace for the new year that will unfold before us in the coming days. I append this below:

    “In the Name of Jesus”

    We are beginning a new year in secular life, not a new Church year. But the earthly year, everyday life, the life of work and worry, is of course the field in which our salvation has to be worked out in God’s sight. And so we have every reason to begin this year too in God's name. Let us in God’s name then begin once more, go on once more, honestly and unwearied. Time presses. Once can fall into despair or melancholy when one realizes on New Year’s Eve that yet another part of one’s earthly life is irrevocably past. But time presses on towards God and eternity, not towards the past and destruction. And so—in God’s name!

    There is a pious custom of writing C+M+B [the names of the Three Wise Men] above the doors at Epiphany. Let us inscribe above the gate of the New Year the name of God, the name of God in whom is our help, the name of Jesus. Jesus means: Yahweh helps. Yahweh was the proper name of the God of the Old Testament nation of the Covenant. That we can give God a name, God the nameless and incomprehensible, whom man of himself ultimately knows only as remote and obscure and incomprehensible, is due to the fact that he made himself known in the history of his own action and speech. We can perceive from the way in which he acts how he really wills to be in our regard. All the experiences which man has had with the living God in his action in us are summed up in the “name” of his God. Only a proper name, never a merely abstract general concept, comprises the full, indivisible and irreducible totality of what can be experienced of a living person through lasting relations with them. And Jesus as a proper name tells us how Yahweh willed to be in our regard: close, loving, helpful, faithful to the end. In Jesus and by him we know what we have in God. Otherwise we do not. He is the Word of the Father, in whom as the word of mercy God expresses himself to the world. Consequently if we wish to say who our God is, we must say “Jesus.” If we are to forget this Word, God would disappear for us into the dark inaccessibility of an incomprehensible “ground of the world.” But we Christians know the definitive name of God: Jesus. For that is the name which that child received who is God and the eternal youth of the world, who is a man and as such the eternal countenance of God.

    Let us give this name to the coming year. Let us sign the Cross of this Jesus on brow, mind and heart. Let us say with relief: our help is in the name of the Lord! And then stoutheartedly let us cross the threshold of the New Year. If his name shines above it, even its darkest hour will be an hour of the year of the Lord and of his salvation.

    source: Karl Rahner, Everyday Faith (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968)

    photo: IHS are the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek

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"Bukas Palad"
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I hope you will find in these posts something that speaks to you of the God who loves us all and who always holds us in the palm of his hand. Blessings!
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Fall in Love, Stay in Love
Fall in Love, Stay in Love

"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

Pedro Arrupe, sj, Superior General, 1965 - 1983

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is a 50something Catholic who resides in Singapore and works for the Church. He is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.
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The views I express in these pages are personal. They do not speak for the Society of Jesus or the Catholic Church.
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