1. Year A / Ordinary Time / Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul
    Readings: Acts 12.1-11 / Psalm 33 (R/v 8) / 2 Tim 4.6-8, 17-18 / Matthew 16.13-19


    Don’t we all need a hero or two in our lives?  

    Someone whose life encourages us to overcome our limitations whatever they are. Someone whose life-story gives us hope to succeed, especially when the odds are against us. May be, even someone whose history challenges us to rise above the discrimination and injustices we face because others judge us lesser for being different, for saying and doing the unusual, or for having made mistakes in our past.

    Perhaps, our need for a hero or two is much simpler: to show us how to better live and love as a good parent, a gracious friend, a caring employer, an exemplary worker, or a diligent student. 

    I believe we each have a hero whose life-story we return to repeatedly. His life or her example is a wellspring from which you and I draw inspiration, wisdom and example to live our lives well. 

    The Church offers us heroes too. We call them saints. Today, we remember and celebrate two of them, Peter and Paul. 

    Peter, first among the Apostles, served the early Jewish converts by gathering them as the Church to worship Jesus as Lord and Savior. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, converted many by preaching that Jesus is the Christ who saves, and for them established the first Christian communities in Corinth, Ephesus and Galatia.  

    Why does the Church invite us to commemorate the lives of Peter and Paul? Because they proclaimed and taught the Good News, and so established the beginnings of what we profess to be the Catholic Christian faith. Our Church is founded on this faith. And through the Church’s teachings and tradition, we live and move and have our Catholic way of living and loving in this Church. In this celebration, we are especially thankful that they founded the Church through their martyrdom. 

    I don’t know about you but I have often found it difficult to identity with Peter and Paul as I go about trying to live my Christian life. When I read the Bible, David’s contrition before God inspires me, Mary’s openness to God humbles me, and John’s friendship with Jesus enlivens me. 

    For me, however, Peter and Paul are but the really great apostles and martyrs. Their apostolic lives and their zealous deeds are larger than life, at the least the ordinary life I live. Perhaps, you feel the same way about them. At best, we probably admire them, and from a distance. On a feast like today’s, I have often thought, “There’s no way I can be like them.”

    But I want to challenge us to put aside this mindset; it is not helpful in approaching today’s solemnity. It blinds us to the real gift Peter and Paul’s life-stories can give us for Christian living. We need another lens to look at them: it should not focus only on what they achieved or how they died for the faith. Rather, this lens should help us focus more attentively on what is so often overlooked in a celebration like today’s. What we need to look for that almost invisible detail of what they first received from God: mercy.

    If Peter and Paul are here, they would be the first to tell us that they have nothing to be proud about. They would tell us this because they know who they were. Cowardly Peter who denied his best friend three times and self-righteous Paul who persecuted and imprisoned Jesus’ first followers. They know they are flawed individuals.

    But Peter and Paul would ask us to remember that Jesus called and gifted them in God’s mercy with transformed lives. God chose Peter in Jesus to be the Church’s foundation: “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.” And God chose Paul in Jesus to be his chosen instrument to proclaim his name to the Gentiles (Acts 9.15). Though they were hardly wise, all knowing, all good, God chose them. God chose them precisely because they were ordinary men who had made mistakes.

    What Peter and Paul discovered in being chosen is that God’s mercy Jesus taught about truly saves the sinner. Jesus, who identifies himself to Peter as the betrayed friend and to Paul as the persecuted Lord, compassionately reaches out to save them from guilt, despair and self-doubt. And saving them meant transforming them into his collaborators to make God’s saving love real for Jews and Gentiles. 

    The Christian truth we celebrate today is that God’s mercy does indeed save, and it always saves when we encounter Jesus. This is why Peter and Paul’s lives must really matter to you and me. Through their humanly flawed but divinely graced lives, we—who are flawed too—are also being graced with God’s mercy, and its promised transformation as our salvation. This is why Pope Francis always says, “God never tires of forgiving. Never!” We will poorer if we see today’s celebration as just another Sunday obligation to fulfill because we will miss this gift of God’s mercy completely.

    We probably identify easily with the impetuous Peter who desires to come to Jesus on the water but panics and sinks when the seas get rough, or the zealous Paul whose forthrightness about the faith sometimes upset others. But I suspect it is harder for us experience God’s mercy because we judge our human foibles, weaknesses and sinfulness more harshly than God. And, yet, don’t we always yearn for God’s saving mercy? 

    Where can we experience God’s mercy? The Trappist monks at Spencer Abbey in Massachusetts offer us an answer. They tell us that it is the very place wherein we experience things falling apart in our lives. This space of fragmentation is where we truly become more open, more available to God’s mercy. Consider Peter in his betrayal and Paul in his time of conversion. The moment when things fall apart in our lives is the graced time when we are most opened to God’s mercy in Jesus and to the good news that it will transform us.

    I’d like to suggest that this is the real heroism Peter and Paul model for us. It is their willingness to embrace their vulnerability when things fall apart in life. Their vulnerability is the graced space for God’s mercy to act in their lives. 

    Mercy that gave Peter courage to bear witness when it counted and wisdom to set up and lead the infant church. And mercy that taught Paul to trust Jesus’s forgiveness and to go forth to preach about Jesus in the face of inevitable persecution and death. And what about you and me: where will we let God’s mercy take us?

    This is why it is so important in our everyday lives to pay attention to Jesus’ question to Peter, ”Who do you say I am?” It is a question couched in God’s mercy. It is God's hope-filled question that will open us up to God’s desire to save us in Jesus. 

    “Who do you say that I am? Who am I for you? What is your experience of me in your life, in your history? How do you experience me now?” Jesus whispers these questions to each of us in the depths of our hearts, at every moment each day. What will you and I answer? 

    Perhaps when we dare to admit how Jesus’ question really opens us up to God because all our categories of who our Lord is will begin to fall part in the face of his love, then we can be like Peter and Paul. Like them, we will recognize ourselves as sinners desperately—yes, desperately—beloved by God in Jesus. 

    Then with Peter we can say, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” and with Paul, “All I want is to know you, Christ Jesus, and to experience the power flowing from your resurrection” (Philippians 3.10). And with these, nothing else really matters.



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: god's mercy by willy sukumoto
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  2. Year A / Ordinary Time / Solemnity of the Holy Trinity
    Readings: Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9 / Psalm Deu 3.52-56 (R/v52b) / 2 Cor 13.11-13 / John 3.16-18


    Have you ever stood before the sea or the ocean? So wide that you couldn’t see the other end, only the water’s edge blending into the distant sky and becoming one, endless horizon? I believe most of us who have gazed upon such a sight have felt overwhelmed.

    This was my experience three summers ago on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Walking along the lakeshore, I often found myself pausing to look out at it. I would repeatedly be overwhelmed by its sheer expanse; it was so big, so wide, and I could never see its other end. 

    Perhaps if you were there with me, then, you might have done what I did: I tried to make sense of Lake Michigan using what I knew from past geography classes and from maps I had seen before. You might perhaps have also googled on your mobile to find out its length, its breadth, and its depth. 

    It’s natural for us to want to know things and people that are foreign or unfamiliar to us. In such moments we try to give them shape and form and size. This is one way we can comprehend them, and thus say with some certainty that this is what it is or this is what it is not.

    This might be how some of us also approach Trinity Sunday. We might feel the need to make sense of our belief in one God who is in three persons, and so, better comprehend God. Thus, some of us might be expecting a homily that theologically or philosophically explains how God can be one yet three.

    I’d like to propose, however, that today’s celebration challenges us to neither decipher, nor dissect who God as Trinity is. Our readings do not ask us to explain how God is Trinitarian. They do not offer a theological interpretation “to unpack” what we mean when we say God is Father, Son and Spirit working in the world for our salvation.

    What then are we celebrating on this Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, you might be asking?

    We can catch a glimpse of an answer to these questions by first admitting to ourselves and to each other that God as Trinity will always be a mystery—this is the real mystery of who God is in our lives. 

    The mystery of God is not meant to confuse us, nor to confound us. Rather, it is God’s invitation to us to enter more fully into God’s life and God’s love. Each of us wants to better know who God is and what God does in our lives; this desire is right and good. But we cannot begin to really understand God unless we are willing to accept and embrace the mystery God truly is.

    To do this well, we must be prepared to let go of how we imagine, conceptualize, image and speak about God. Only then can we meet God as God is. We also have to be ready to let go of what others have told or taught or shared with us about how God is supposed to look like and how God is supposed to act. Only then can God be God to us and for us as God wishes, not as we want.

    Our first reading shows us how this is so in Moses’ relationship with God. Notice how Moses keeps quiet before God. It is God who proclaims his own name, “Lord,” and who describes who he is, “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and richer in kindness and fidelity.” Moses bowing down exemplifies how he enters into the mystery of God: with humility. It is in humbling oneself into silence, and letting go of how God is supposed to be and act according to one’s thinking that one can hear God. This is how one then enters more fully into the life and love of God. We would be wise to imitate Moses if we wish to enter more fully into God and God’s promise of eternal life. 

    This is why Trinity Sunday makes this radical invitation to you and me: let us humble ourselves before God. 

    Today, we are being asked to acknowledge that our intellect is always too tiny for God; it cannot begin to approach the God who loves without measure and without regret. No matter how many degrees we have, or how street-smart we are, or how wise we have grown to become, God will always remain greater than we can ever envisage God to be. 

    Indeed, how can we ever adequately comprehend what John’s gospel once again today reminds us is the truth of our Christian faith: that God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son so to that we will never be lost to death but that we might have eternal life?

    The prayers and readings in today’s liturgy seem to indicate that our image of who God is and what is on God’s mind is more tiny than troubled. We probably trip and stumble more over our puny sense of God than over conflicting statements about the Creed or differing theological considerations that have tried so hard to define, to prescribe and to catalogue God as Trinity. 

    Ironically, it is our human poverty to know God—the mystery of our own deepest neediness to comprehend God as Father, Son and Spirit—that will save us. It will free us from our heady fixation to unravel and to solve this mystery of God as Trinity as we insist we must according to our point of view, to our preference, to our ideology about God. This poverty is exactly what will ultimately pull the “curtain” back and enable us to fix in our hearts the reality of God as Trinity in our lives: God loves us. 

    However, it is because we sometimes feel ourselves outside of God’s fingertips, or we struggle so much to shake off what feels like God only embracing us grudgingly and reluctantly that God has become tiny, misunderstood, disappointing for many. But how do you and I explain that surprising moment when the utter fullness of God rushes in on us, and we experience this Trinitarian reality of God living in us and for us?

    I’d like to suggest that the question we have to answer on Trinity Sunday is not how “three are one”? Rather, it is: are we poor enough to make room to experience God loving us as the Trinity in our lives? 

    Poor enough to really know that God as Father is with us always, ever approaching and addressing us until the end of the world?  Poor enough to let Jesus plunge us into depths of God’s saving love, not only sacramentally at our baptism, but at every moment to live out our baptismal life more fully? Poor enough as our life ends to still open ourselves to the Spirit that leads us our of death into God’s embracing adoption that will only make us cry out, “Abba!”? Indeed, being poor enough for God is how we can enjoy what today’s solemnity invites us into: immersing and anchoring ourselves in the fullness of God.

    Perhaps, if we dare to embrace the poverty of our need to know God as Trinity, you and I might experience more fully the mystery of God. 

    Then, our humility can remind us of how we once upon a time entered into the wide blue expanse of the ocean on a hot summer’s day. Whether it was taking those tentative steps to gingerly dip ourselves into its cool, or running into the surf with glee, jumping over its waves with boldness and diving into its depths with carefree abandonment, we will remember that even though we were engulfed by the sea, we were also borne afloat on its tide and ebb, on its rhythm of life. 

    And this too is how we will always live and move and have our being in God who is indeed Father, Son and Spirit in our lives.



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: from the internet
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  3. Year A / Eastertide / Pentecost 
    Readings: Acts 2.1-11 / Psalm 104 (R/v 30) / 1 Cor 12.3b-7, 12-13 / John 20.19-23


    There is nothing like an embrace. 

    An embrace speaks to us honestly of how much we are welcomed or accepted, of how much we are forgiven or affirmed. Yes, an embrace whispers the truth of how much you and I are really loved by our spouse or lover, by our family member or friend, even by those who forgive us for the hurt we have caused them.

    Pentecost is also about an embrace: it is about God embracing us in the Spirit even more. Today, we celebrate God’s embrace in the Spirit that is infinitely wide and boundless, ever present and always life-giving. 

    Luke the evangelist captures this truth so well in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. He describes people in Jerusalem hearing the apostles speak about God and God’s saving action in Jesus. They hear this message, this Good News, in their native languages, even if it is proclaimed with a Galilean accent. 

    Luke tells us that these people, Jews, come from Mesopatamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, and Rome. These are places where these Jews spread out to after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem six centuries before Jesus’ birth. Luke’s point in describing this wide geographical expanse is that everyone in the Jewish world was capable of hearing the Good News the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, were proclaiming at Pentecost. 

    Hearing and accepting the Good News has been a theme in our first readings at all the masses throughout the Easter season. We have heard how the Good News was proclaimed and accepted by many beyond the limits of Jerusalem and the Jewish world. Recall how the apostle Philip taught the Scriptures to the eunuch and baptized him. Recall how Paul’s missionary journeys were about the conversion of the first Christians who heard about Jesus and accepted him as Lord and Saviour. 

    All that we hear and see in today’s narration of the first Pentecost summarizes what our Easter readings at Mass have proclaimed to us: that the embrace of God’s Spirit knows no limits or boundaries. 

    And aren’t we already embraced by God? I believe we know the answer:  it explains why you and I are here, Sunday after Sunday, at Mass, in spite of our struggles to live the Christian life well.

    This is why God’s embrace in the Spirit is infinitely wide and boundless.

    Pentecost’s revelation that God embraces us even more and always must once again direct our gaze onto Jesus on Cross; there he fleshed out God’s embrace. “He stretched out his hand as he endured the Passion so to break the bond of death and manifest the resurrection” (Eucharistic Prayer II). His outstretched arms enfold us into God’s merciful and loving embrace. It is this embrace that truly forgives and welcomes home every sinner, not matter the sin or its magnitude. 

    Our gospel reading today reminds us that this "fleshing out" did not stop at the Cross. For, “on that evening of the first day of the week” Jesus came and stood in the midst of the shattered and broken disciples. And he embraced them with his forgiveness and his peace. He again fleshed out God’s forgiving embrace.  No, his death did not break this reality of God embracing us into this love, into his life.

    And Pentecost—the gift of Jesus’ Spirit into our lives—reminds us that God’s forgiving, universal embrace will not stop with Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. For having breathed onto the apostles and saying to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven,” Jesus has bestowed on each of us the grace to continue fleshing out this forgiveness in our daily lives for one another. Indeed, the invitation Pentecost makes to us is this: go and embrace each other into God’s embrace.

    This is how God’s embrace in the Spirit continues to ever present in our lives today.

    How can we enfold one another into God’s embrace? What must we do to live in God’s way of loving and forgiving that often seems impossible to accomplish on our own? 

    Pentecost assures us that we can because the Spirit of God has already been poured out within and among us. It is in and through this Spirit that we can forgive, love and draw one another into God’s expansive embrace. 

    We would be wise then to pay attention to our second reading: here, Paul teaches about how we are to live and move and have our being in the Spirit. 

    We each have a gift from the Spirit. We each are called to a different service in Jesus who gives us this Spirit. We are each drawn by the Spirit to live and work, to pray and play in a different way because God loves each of us as we are, not the same but uniquely different and special. For Paul, our differences are meant for one and only one thing: building up the community. The richness of our diversity is to bring us into the beauty of our unity in God, through Jesus and in his Spirit. How so?

    Consider our eucharistic celebration, right here, right now. It eloquently shows us how the gift of the Spirit always draws us into the one embrace of God. Our greeters welcome. Our choir sings. Our lectors proclaim God’s Word and our servers serve at God’s table. Our Eucharistic Ministers bring communion to you and your prayers and worship bring us all ever closer into God’s presence. And I come to serve you. We are each gifted for a different role in our liturgy. 

    As we come together, as we bring the riches of our varied gifts from the Spirit and use them in complementary ways to make our Eucharist alive and real, God transforms us. We become one; we become the one body of Christ. This is how we are blessed, broken and given to each other and many more to have life in God’s hands. And this is indeed the way God lifts us all into his embrace where we will rest in the fullness of life and love, like God once raised Jesus from the dead into.  This is what it means to be union with God and in communion with one another.

    This is how God’s embrace in the Spirit is always life-giving.

    The love of God’s Spirit is infinitely wide and boundless, ever present and always life-giving. These are three ways God embraces us into divine life with Godself. This reality of Christian life is the something more God has already surprised us with. This is what we remember and celebrate today on Pentecost Sunday. It is good to end our Easter season on this note because the Holy Spirit is God’s more—God’s overflowing more for each one of us, everyday of our lives.

    So, take a deep breath now…tomorrow…all this week...everyday of your lives…and listen…listen to and listen for the Spirit of God breathing on you, breathing into you, breathing you. And as we do so, I believe you and I will hear this: the whisper of the Lord carried on the Spirit’s breath saying to each one of us, "Yes, you are my beloved child in whom I delight."



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    artwork: embrace of peace II by geogre tooker


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  4. Year A / Eastertide / 7th Sunday
    Readings: Acts 1.12-14 / Psalm 26 (R/v 22) / 1 Peter 4.13-16 / John 17.1-11


    Counselors and therapists suggest five rituals to bid farewell to the people we’ve lived with and to the places we’ve inhabited. We say thank you. We ask for forgiveness. We forgive. We express our love for the gift of each other in relationship: for all that has been and all that will come. And, finally we say goodbye.

    You might have experienced some of these rituals when you had finished your studies or completed your work overseas, and had to come home or to move to a new place. In recent weeks, I found myself participating in these rituals as I bade farewell to my life and my friends in Boston.

    As with many a goodbye we’ve all experienced, my closest Jesuit friends and I exchanged gifts to remember each other by. We gifted each other with a book or a hoodie. We shared a final meal or had one last drink for the road. We celebrated Eucharist together or heard each other’s confession.

    A gift I especially cherish is that of a simple medal of St Michael and the Guardian Angel. My good Jesuit friend who put it into my hand as we parted said it is not just for remembrance; it is also to remind me always that God, through these watchful angels, would bring me home safely.

    Coming home, which my friend desired for me not only now but in death, speaks of what is most human in all of us. We all long to come home and to be at home.

    Each of us envisions being at home differently. For some, it has to do with local food or the seasonal weather. For others, it is about being with particular people who provide comfort, security and love. However we envisage home to be, one thing is for sure: it has to do with belonging. It about being in that space where we can be our truest selves, without fear, and being free to love and to be loved as we are.

    As a people of faith, we profess that our home is ultimately with God.

    Every word of Jesus’ prayer in our gospel passage speaks of this spiritual yearning Jesus has for himself, and also for you and me to be with God. We ourselves express this desire with each confession we make, but, more so, with our hope that Jesus will save us at the hour of our death.

    Today, we hear Jesus praying for God to glorify him with the glory that he had “before the world began.” For Jesus, this glory is the goodness of knowing who God is and the truth of being truly who he is with God, the Word of God. Here is Jesus speaking about glory in terms of being in communion with God. What Jesus testifies to in this prayer is the beauty of being at home in God. More specifically, this ‘glory’ of being at home has to do with God’s love for us. Jesus’ prayer reminds all that the self-forgetful love and intimacy he shares with God is where we also and always belong.

    We have a glimpse of this reality whenever we experience God’s mercy forgiving us and bringing us home to God again and again. Jesus prays for this gift that we can be at home with God. He does this by asking God to draw us into the reality of being one with God and of being at home in God’s love. Indeed, Jesus’ prayer assures one and all that there is always room for everybody in God’s divine embrace.

    This is his farewell gift to his disciples and to us: it bestows us with genuine hope that we will come home to God. For as Jesus tells God: it is his desire that the love with which God has for him may be the love of God his disciples also have.

    In Jesus, then, you and I hear the truth of who we are to God: we are not orphans because of sin but we are God’s beloved. We sang this truth in our gospel refrain. This truth should be our Christian joy as we continue our journey home to God. It is moreover the joy we can have as we struggle with our pains and sufferings, as we hear in our second reading: “If you can have some share in the sufferings of Christ, be glad, because you will enjoy a much greater gladness when his glory is revealed.”

    Jesus’ glory is therefore the glory of One who draws us and all creation into that sacred space he calls home with God, the Father. His farewell gift is therefore not a promise we have to await for as an advent future. Rather, it is a promise already fulfilled through his death and resurrection; we are already at home with God. Just look at where we are now and what you and I are doing here.

    Here, in this place, we remember that Jesus’ dwelling space with God is also our home.

    Here, in this space, we celebrate that this home always has a table at which all of us—no matter whether we are saint or sinner—has a place reserved for us to feast with God and with one another.

    And here is where we can believe with certain hope that we will indeed dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our lives when our earthly journeys are done.

    Why should we reflect on Jesus’ farewell gift today? I believe it can help us to more generously share our Easter joy. Easter makes real Jesus’ farewell gift; we have come home to God through his death and resurrection. This is what we celebrate with joy and gratitude as an Easter people whenever we gather in this space, God’s home.

    But our eucharistic celebration means nothing if we do not go forth from this space and share the good news that there are many rooms in God’s house for each and everyone.

    How can we do this? Consider how the simple exchange of peace we will make shortly offers us a way to do so. When we exchange our peace with one another, don’t we feel welcome, accepted, embraced, at home? If your answer is ‘yes,’ then what the Church is asking you and me to do is to go and do likewise for someone else. This is how we make the reality of truly being “at home” in God’s glory, of really being one in God’s all-inclusive love, alive for one another.

    In a similar way, this is how my friend who gave me the medal taught me that coming home is God’s deepest desire for me. Perhaps, our reflection today on Jesus’ prayer as his longing to be at home with God—for himself and for us—has helped you to better appreciate that coming home is God’s deepest desire for you too.

    If this has been your experience—as it was mine with my friend—then I think there is no better response we can make to Jesus’ prayer for us than this: to go forth from this space and to place into another’s hand this same gift that in Jesus God will always bring him and her and all of them home too.

    Shall we not do this for someone else today?



    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo from the internet; michelephoenix.com.

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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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