1. A painful experience many of us have is facing and accepting emptiness in our lives.

    I have been reflecting on this in recent days. Several incidents have led me here. Watching fellow Jesuits grapple with deaths of loved ones and Jesuit brothers. Accompanying a good friend in her struggles to come to terms with a friendship she hopes for but will never be. And, as I leafed through memories, recalling places lived and faces known that I have departed from in my life’s journey.

    When emptiness stares us in the face, we often look for other distractions to fill it up with. Sometimes, we deny it is part of our living and we banish it away to the darkest corner of our forgetfulness. Truth be told, we would rather keep running away from it.

    Yet, Lent asks us to enter emptiness. Accidents, events nor others create this. Rather, it is God. If we listen carefully to our Lenten readings, we will hear God calling us to rend open our hearts and to enter them. If we do so, we might find an emptiness. An emptiness of a hurt not forgiven. Of a falsity that is not our true selves. Of promising beginnings squandered.

    I think many of us hesitate to enter this space. I know I do, now and again. We recoil from entering it because we know that there we will have to acknowledge our regrets and faults, even confess parts of ourselves that are dark, sad and embarrassing. Some of us fear being swallowed up by the emptiness, while others experience it as an ache that cries out to be understood and comforted.

    Lent presents you and me with time and reason to retreat into our hearts. There, we can prayerfully contemplate the emptiness within. As we reflect on our struggles with it, so often fixated on self--on how good or bad I am; on how much I am a success or a failure--we will surprisingly find ourselves having stepped into an opening, like a clearing in the woods. And then, we will perceive this truth: here, always with us, is God. God who comforts my Jesuit brothers in their loss with promised new life and communion for all. God who is guiding my friend through her pain to greater freedom. God who taught me that partings are not ends but necessary beginnings to grow up from. God who is ever faithful and never abandons.

    Thus, Lenten prayer, like Lenten fasting and almsgiving, can remind us of our liberating dependence on God. As such, this emptiness cannot be a void. Rather, it is the necessary space for grace. In this grace-filled place, we come to see who God is and who we truly are. This entitles us to reclaim, once again, our rightful inheritance, communion with God. Lent invites us into the desert of our hearts not to experience barrenness but to savor God faithfully reclaiming us into loving intimacy.

    Perhaps, this is why running away from emptiness is not as life-giving as embracing it. Honestly, this is never easy to do, but taking first steps this Lent can lead us there.






    photo: tree at the trappist monastery, spencer, massachusetts by adsj

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  2. Have you had an experience of listening to a song over and over again? Finding it enlivening you? Finding it inviting you to deeper reflection? Finding it pointing you back to the memory of a face or a place, be it happy or sad?
    Adele’s Rolling in the Deep has been playing on my iPod of late. Its lyrics speak of the human heart. Its notes beat an infectious danceable rhythm. Her rich, melodious voice captures the song’s cadences. It’s a joy to listen to. But more than this, it sings to me of friendship, gifted as it is by good friend with whom I share music and theology, faith and Jesuit life with.
    As I walked to and from school listening to it now and again, I wondered about the place of songs in our lives. In particular, about how sharing songs in friendship can lead us to the surprising gift of encountering God anew. How can this be?
    In the Old Testament, prophets and psalmists used lamentations and psalms to invite the Israelites to hear and remember God’s faithful goodness. The Israelites collected and used them in communal liturgy to celebrate God’s love in their midst, especially in times of oppression, suffering and exile. In their listening to and singing these songs, they also found inspired hope in God’s promised future salvation to carry on living.
    The Gospels, on the other hand, record no songs sung by Jesus or his disciples. It does however speak of Jesus attending a wedding feast, where there would have been music to enjoy, to sing along with and to dance to. For me, this image of festivity expresses God’s unfailing delight in and loving concern for humankind through Jesus’ words and deeds. In forgiving, healing and uplifting the poor, the broken and the sinful, Jesus was God’s living song the Jews not only heard but witnessed it sung. As Christians, we see in Jesus God loving us too for what we are, God’s own, and not for who we think we have to become to please God.
    Indeed, hearing and seeing are ways to encounter God. I believe these are how songs shared among friends can also lead us into deeper friendship with God.
    When a friend shares a song, we don’t just hear the music or lyrics: we see the person. A song shared can speak of a friend's infectious delight with life; and do we not find ourselves rejoicing, laughing and singing along with her too? Also, who amongst us is not touched by a song that gives voice to a friend’s pain or hurt, and with which we accompany him by echoing compassionately his refrain for hope? Indeed, when friends share songs, they share more than a melody: they share themselves. For songs shared among friends tell us a little bit more about each other, as it also continues composing their friendship. In a song shared, then, the real present is each other’s presence.
    But this sharing is not just human; it is traced with the divine. In sharing self, in giving up a little more of our innermost, private selves to become a little more public and more present to each other, we act in God’s likeness: generosity of self. Freely and lovingly, we too empty ourselves, like God once did, to come to one another as Jesus showed in hopeful trust to be friend, and so, share life and faith.
    And can it not be that in this generosity we meet God a little more clearly and surely in our sharing songs?

    photo from futurenextlevel.blogspot.com

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  3. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

    With these words, priests and lay ministers signed many a forehead with ashes on Ash Wednesday, which began Lent last week. We, Christians, understand Lent as a graced time: it calls us to conversion. To turn away from sinful ways of living that diminish our dignity and scar our wellbeing and to live life more fully in God and with one another. Lent invites us then to live as we are created for.

    But who are we to live life? The ashes we were signed with can help us answer this question. They speak of our roots: out of dust, out of the worthless nothingness, God fashioned with great love and in deep reverence the splendor of creation, humankind. They express the reality of God loving us into existence for no other purpose than to live life joyfully with God and one another.

    These ashes express more, however. Signed on our foreheads in the form of the cross they are transformed: they are not nothingness, as they are redeemed preciousness. God creating us out of nothingness is God seeing in its dust and ashes the inestimable beauty of what our humanity is, the finite form of God’s infinite Love. This is who you and I are called to become more really in Lent and why we can live fully.

    Thus, the cross of ashes on our foreheads at Lent's beginning must remind us that God birthed us into existence for life, not death. Our Lenten prayer, fast and almsgiving are to help us remember, celebrate and believe in this truth of Christian faith: God created us to save us, not condemned us.

    Lent directs our gaze to the Cross that expresses this truth most visibly. There hanging on its wooden beams is one like us whose faithful love of God and compassionate love for humankind so pleased God that God raised him from the dead. Jesus on the Cross is the fullness that humanity can become: totally self-giving love. Jesus raised from the dead is what human self-giving love is destined for: communion with God and one another. Both speak of the fullness of Beauty, that is always human and divine: God loved us into living and we can live God in our loving.

    This is the hope-filled reality of being human and believing in God the Church invites us to reflect on in Lent. Indeed, this is the reason Lent can be our joyful season.

    Have a blessed Lent, my friends.


    photo: the herald, malaysia


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"Bukas Palad"
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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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