1. For my Lenten reflection this year, I am reading, once again, Returning: God’s Love calls us home by Henri Nouwen.

    I first received Nouwen’s text during Lent in 2004 when it was distributed to our Arrupe community. Since then, I have returned to it each Lenten season, using his reflections for the days of Lent for my own prayer and recollection at this time. Each yearly repetition has allowed me to go deeper into myself and my relationship with God at this joyful time of turning over and coming home with trust and joy in the Lord, which I’d described Lent as in my previous post. Nouwen’s reflections also allow me to face more honestly the light and darkness within me as I try to stand more truthfully before our loving God and the people I live and work with these days to see how much more growing up I have to do as a person, a Catholic Christian and a Jesuit.

    Nouwen’s theme for this first week of Lent is “Letting Go.” He writes:

    ‘Not my will, but yours be done.’ That prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane is difficult—but it is the most important prayer we can pray. Indeed, it is the essence of prayer. Learning to surrender our will, learning to ‘let go,’ is the ultimate goal of all Lenten devotion.

    I resonate with Nouwen, as I do too with his observation that human beings never find it easy to let go and let God lead. This act of abandoning ourselves into God’s hands demands so much of us, who want, more often than not, to do and have things our ways, even as we profess we believe in God and know that God expects better of us in following the way of Love and Goodness. There are times when I am guilty of this self-centered disposition, as I think so many of us will also admit to, especially, in Lent when we pause to take stock of ourselves and God’s place or role in the lives we live. Yet, this spiritual attitude of letting go and letting God take charge, Nouwen points out, is something we all desire, and can hope to attain when we truly believe that God is pure love.

    He ends today’s reflection with the prayer of abandonment by Charles de Foucauld that he writes “expresses beautifully the spiritual attitude I wish I had [and] I still pray for it, even though the words do not yet fully come from my heart.”

    Perhaps, we too can join Nouwen in de Foucauld's prayer so that these words will one day come fully and truthfully from our hearts:

    Father,
    I abandon myself into your hands.
    Do with me what you will.
    Whatever you may do, I thank you.
    I am ready for all. I accept all.
    Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures.
    I wish no more than this, O Lord.
    Into your hands, I commend my spirit.
    I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
    For I love you, Lord, and so need to give,
    to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
    and with confidence beyond all questioning because you are my Father.
    Amen


    photo: david niblack

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  2. Lord, you are merciful to all, and hate nothing you have created. You overlook the sins of men and women to bring them to repentance. You are the Lord our God.
    These lines make up the entrance antiphon to today’s Eucharistic celebration. They present us with an image of a forgiving God, who loves without limits, and who now calls out to Christians throughout the world to enter fully into the Lenten observances that begin today and will end in the joyful mystery of Jesus’ resurrection at Easter.

    Lent is a special time when the Church reminds us to appreciate anew the many subtle signs of God’s love in our lives. We are asked to see with gratitude the goodness of God in all that we are and have in this existence. We are then invited to examine our lives honestly and to see in what ways our present lifestyles are less than the fullness of goodness we are called to live. This reflection can help us realize anew that we can better live the Good Life intended for us with hope and happiness by turning over a new leaf in areas where we are less than good.

    The image of turning over a new leaf is most expressively intertwined with the image of coming or returning home. Richard Pindell’s short story, “Somebody’s Son,” about the runaway David’s homecoming captures this image of turning over anew as coming home vividly.

    David wrote to his mother asking if his father would accept him again after his act of running and staying away from the family. In the letter, David asked his Dad to tie a white cloth to the apple tree in the field next to their home if he accepted him home. On the train going home, David is apprehensive, even fearful. His anxiety increases as the train rounds a bend beyond which the apple tree would be visible. He is so apprehensive that he turns to a stranger and asks him to watch for the white cloth. David is too afraid to look; he closes his eyes. Then, he hears the stranger’s exclamation, tinged with surprise and an overwhelming sense of bewilderment: “Why son, there’s a white cloth tied to practically every branch!”

    We can imagine the ending to this story: David’s forgiving and accepting father welcomes him with open arms, embracing him with the overflowing love of one who knows what it is to have that which is most precious in his life, his child, back in his arms.

    The Evangelist Luke also presents a beautifully moving image of the father as the God who runs not only to meet and welcome us, his children, who return from our wanderings afar and astray, home but to bestow upon us, once again, our rightful identity and inheritance. Luke presents us with a portrait of the prodigal father, the one who lavishes generously all that he has on his child, keeping nothing for himself. The father's loving act dispossesses himself of everything in favour of his child's wellbeing.

    Lent points us to the God who is prodigal too: God is the prodigious One who gives his Son for humankind’s salvation gratuitously, expecting nothing in return. The Easter mystery, which lies on the horizon of our Lenten journey, speaks of the goodness God sees in humankind and that Jesus willingly dies to save. We recall this each time we read the psalmist who answers his own cry, “what is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?” with this truth that we too can utter today: “you made him little less than a god; with glory and honor you have crowned him” (Ps 8).


    artwork: charles mackesy

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  3. It’s sunset on Chinese New Year’s eve, here on the Ateneo campus. The last bursts of orange and chrome strike the gently swaying foliage outside my room on this balmy evening. Looking out, I am thinking of a yesteryear evening when the retiring day cast similar hues, and jazz filled Aunty Bea’s living room as it does mine now.

    On that eve of yesteryear, we congregated there: Dad reading the Straits Times, Mom nodding away as she caught up on her sleep after cleaning the house, my siblings either watching telly or on the phone, and Aunties Bea and Flo in the kitchen as they lovingly put the finishing touches to the reunion meal. It would be meal of our favourite Peranakan dishes of babi pongteh, sambal timun, itik tim, bakwang kepting and buah keluak. The fragrant aroma wafted through her Pinegrove apartment. They drew us to the dishes spread out on her pine table; and so, we gathered as family around the table of plenty and shared this reunion meal. Then, we returned to the living room for coffee, cake and kueh tart to talk and tell stories. With the telly tuned to Channel 8 in the background, we waited for the inevitable countdown; we the many in Chinatown, we counted down the final moments of the preceding year and  welcome cheerfully the new with good wishes, kisses and hugs, and a bubbly or two.

    While my family in Singapore gathers at Geri and Ken’s this evening so that Baby Glenn does not have to make the long trip across the island and partake of the meal of traditional fare and the customary countdown, I will spend it with my brothers here in Arrupe in Manila. We will have our usual simple Saturday dinner. Thereafter, some of us will watch the video of the week, while others will retire to read a book or send off some emails. A few might wander across Katipunan for coffee and cake. It will be a quiet night for us here. At midnight however the Chinese brothers in our community will gather for festive celebrations. A more formal community celebration awaits all of us in community tomorrow evening; then, there will be home cooked food and the distribution of red packets at dinner.
    This experience of reminiscing about home and being in community, most especially at times like this, is part of the reality of religious life. It is not tense-filled now as it was for me when I first entered. With each year, I find myself integrating this mix of feelings better at times like this, even as I miss being at home.  
    While many religious who are studying or missioned overseas miss being with our families at festive moments, we take heart in being part of the communities we live in and work with. Here, in Arrupe, our brothers are my community. And so, every good wish for a happy and bright new year that we will greet each other with tomorrow will remind us of the camaraderie we share and the universality of the mission we are called to as Jesuits. I often find this comforting. Though we are an unbelievably mixed plethora of personalities in Arrupe, we share our lives of faith and study as companions brought together by God's good humour. Indeed, we never choose the companions, let alone our family members, we want; each is simply there, a reminder of being simply God’s gift given to us.
    And God’s good humor and kindness is most pronounced when we sit together for our meals, whether we are with our families or in our communities, at whatever occasion or in daily life. Whenever we do this, whenever we come together, we repeat the beauty of that meal Jesus gathers into, Eucharist. This is a graced time to remember thankfully and celebrate wholeheartedly the intermingling of the threads of Jesus' life and our lives. The quilt of each of our lives is made by of these countless threads that we have been woven together, through good and challenging times in the past. And this is a quilt we will continue to weave with new and not so new threads in the coming year. Whatever our threads may be, Jesus will weave with us that multi-hued quilt we call life. The gift is not just this life but our communal act of weaving it together; this is what that keeps us in the warm, secure and connected communion we share with Jesus and with one another.
    Perhaps, in coming together to share our reunion meal this Chinese New Year Eve, wherever we are, we can do so by holding on to what it promises: the expectant newness of weaving and quilting anew. I like to believe this is God's gift--our new year's hope. And so, it will be good for me, for us, to pause and to remember that what we are re-creating tonight and in the coming new year is nothing less than joining in the good work of God--God who labors silently in all our lives as the master weaver of life's tapestry.

    design: quilt pattern by cheryl wittmeyer
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  4. "Love is sufficient of itself, it pleases of itself, and for its own sake. It counts as merit to itself and is its own reward. Besides itself, love requires no motive and seeks no fruit. Its fruit is the enjoyment of itself. I love because I love, and I love for the sake of loving.

    A great thing is love, if yet it returns to its Principle, if it is restored to its Origin, if it finds its way back again to its Fountain-Head, so that it may thus be enabled to continue flowing with an unfailing current. Among all the emotions, sentiments and feelings of the soul, love stands distinguished in this respect, that in the case of it alone has the creature the power to correspond and to make a return to the Creator in kind, though not in equality.

    For when God loves me He desires nothing else than to be loved by me: He loves me in order that I may love Him, because He knows well that all who love Him find in this very love their joy and their happiness."

    St. Bernard of Clairvaux
    Sermon 58 on the Canticle of Canticles


    photo: david niblack

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  5. One of the many heartwarming surprises of studying Philosophy in the Ateneo is the personal prayers our lecturers share with us. I’m always amazed and profoundly humbled when an extremely knowledgeable and competent prof recites a favourite personal prayer as class begins.

    For me, this is like that magical childhood moment when one’s best friend opens his treasure box, and taking out his prized kaleidoscope, places it in his friend’s hand, saying, “it’s yours!” Encountering the following prayer amidst the notes I’d hurriedly scrawled during Dr Leovino Gracia’s Seminar on Levinas last year reminds me gratefully of such a moment:

    Disturb us, O Lord,
    when we are too well-pleased with ourselves;
    when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;
    when we have arrived in safety because we sailed too close to the shore.

    Disturb us, O Lord,
    when with the abundance of things we possess
    we have lost our thirst for the water of life;
    when, having fallen in love with Time,
    we have ceased to dream of Eternity;
    and in our efforts to build the new earth have allowed our vision for the New Heaven to grow dim.

    Stir us, O Lord,
    to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms shall show Thy mastery, where losing sight of land we shall find the stars.

    In the Name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes and invited the brave to follow him.
    Amen.


    photo: unep/topham

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  6. Of late, I have been remembering an evening when Grandma called me to thread the needle for her.

    The scene comes back to me vividly: there she is sitting on her bed in the house we lived in on Butterfly Avenue. A multi-hued sarong wrapped around her lower limbs and the simpler kebaya top that hung on her thin frame, held at its front by the bright topaz colored kerosangs (brooches) that gracefully wound down its front, bestowed upon her an air of bygone days when nonya bibiks in their intricate Peranakan sarong kebayas were a common sight in Singapore. Her head is bent over; her eyes intently fixed on her weary worn fingers as she tried, again and again, to thread a needle to sew a button that had popped off one of my school shirts. I remember the medal of Our Lady hanging from the gold chain around her neck rocking back and forth with each lunge to get the thread in, only to fall back upon her chest with each failed attempt.

    Her hands flopped onto her lap after a few tries. Looking up from an Enid Blyton I was deeply engrossed in, I noticed quiet frustration etched into her face. An almost unexpected desperation scarred her usually placid visage. All my life, Grandma was the strong quiet one for so many of us, even if she was just always a little anxious each time she had to leave the house to go out. But in this brief moment her fragility manifested itself visibly. Framed as she was within its penumbra, the yellow light from the ceiling lamp above intensified this unexpected snapshot.

    I remember her sighing as she called out, “Adrian, come thread this for Mama.” I looked up, leaving behind my meanderings with the Famous Five. “Now, Mama?” She nodded, her tired eyes pleading for help. Getting up, I teased her, saying” Aiyah, Mama, this is so easy” as I threaded the needle in one move. My smile of youthful accomplishment soared on the young’s boastful claim of being able to do what the old find so difficult. Grandma thanked me with her customary warm hug and kiss, adding prophetically, “One day you, when you are older, it will be difficult to do this. It is not so easy, boy. Jangan lupa.” Hearing this, I laughed as I hurriedly resumed the investigative search the Five and I were on somewhere on imaginary Kirrin Island for I was sure that this faraway time would never dawn on me.

    Earlier this week, I’d to sew a button on one of my shirts. Under the bright fluorescent lamp in my room and aided by my reading glasses, I took a considerable time—far more than I did before—to thread the needle.

    At forty-two, the youthful ease of threading the needle is no more; the perfect 20/20 vision of my boyhood has dimmed somewhat as I struggled to align the thread and the needle’s hole. Truly, I am growing older. Age has come; and Mama was right.


    photo by Wendi D

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"Bukas Palad"
"Bukas Palad"
is Filipino for open palms
Greetings!
Greetings!
Peace and welcome, dear friend.
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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©adrian.danker.sj, 2006-2018

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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