1. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 8 / Sunday
    Readings: Isaiah 49.14-15 / Psalm 61.2-3, 6-7, 8-9ab (R/v 6a) / 1 Corinthians 4.1-5 / Matthew 6.24-34


    “What is keeping you awake at night?” It is a question a good friend or a caring family member would definitely ask if you shared with her how much you have tossed and turned as you tried to fall asleep but cannot. “What is keeping you awake at night?” is the question that confronts us when we really want to fall asleep after a long and tiring day but cannot.

    Often times it is our burdens, our struggles and our anxieties that keep us worrying and prevent us from sleeping peacefully. After a while when these overwhelm us and we have sleepless nights, it is natural to feel stressed and confused, lost and empty, even despairing.

    Today’s readings assure us that we can indeed fall sleep and rest each night, but, even more, that we can indeed live life confident that we need not worry excessively. Isn’t this how we all want to live?

    This is why many of us will find the words of our psalm consoling and comforting. They express our hope to rest undisturbed in God, as they attest that we can because God is our strength and hope, our refuge and salvation. Yes, in him alone can we find our rest.

    What kind a God offers this assurance? A God whose heart is tender and who chases after us in love, especially when we have sinned. 

    I believe this is really what is going on when we go to Confession. Often times, we go because we feel the need to confess our sins so that we purify ourselves to receive Holy Communion. But there is a more profound action at work within us: God moves our hearts to draw us to himself in this sacrament, where he forgives us with mercy that is boundless and with compassion that celebrates who we are to God—"you are mine” he says.

    Throughout the gospels, we read and see how Jesus incarnates God’s tenderness and loving pursuit for all peoples, particularly, the sick, the outcast and the sinful. His actions that forgive and heal, teach and make each one whole again in God’s image reveal who God is to us: God is Love. More significantly, his actions must open our eyes to the truth of who we are: we are God’s beloved. This is why we are always worthy for God to seek us out.

    The Christian story is about God noticing us, lost in our sinfulness, and rushing toward us in Jesus to take us to himself. He loses himself in love over us, in selfless love that leads to the Cross. In Jesus, we see a God who cannot help himself: this is how God loves to the end. This is how God promises us the fullness of life.  God’s love looks beyond betrayal to come through locked doors on Easter day to the frightened apostles. Indeed, this is how God’s love has always been the very beginning. I like to imagine the following is how God looked for Adam and Eve in the garden after they has eaten the forbidden apple:
    “Adam, Eve, where are you? Why are you hiding?”  
    “We took what you said we shouldn’t; we took what was not ours. Now, we know we are naked. We are exposed. We have disobeyed you. So, we are hiding ourselves from you. Please go away.”  
    “No, no, I cannot. Please come out. Come out, show yourselves. I am sad but I have come  to look for you. You have nothing to fear. Come out I am waiting for you.”*
    I am waiting for you. What kind of a God would look for us—seek us out especially when we have dismayed him, and wait for us? No other than a God who always remembers us, and never forgets who we are to him. This is the God Jesus revealed to us as our Father.

    Isaiah invites us in our first reading to appreciate how our God cannot forget us, even if a mother could forget her child. God cannot because this is not how God loves and cares for us. The image of tenderness Isaiah uses should remind us that God always responds with more than a mother’s loving embrace, even when we have sinned and disappointed God. Indeed, God is more than we can ever imagine, and the depth, the breadth and the height of his love and care for us much more than we will ever know.

    Jesus reiterates this truth in today’s gospel. It is good news: we do not have to worry about our lives; God will provide.

    Consider how God meets two needs we all worry about and that sometimes keep us from falling asleep. The first is appearance. Some are preoccupied with power, self-possession, and desirability. Others worry about projecting the right public image. A few are anxious that their false appearances may unravel. The second is nourishment for life. Yes, we worry about having enough food and drink for ourselves and for others. But we also crave for popularity, acceptance and adulation because these nourish our egos that starve for recognition and celebration. Both needs make us anxious about our self-identity and self-worth. We seek the material in life to support our fragile interiors.

    Today Jesus reminds us that God’s goodness is not only already present in our lives but it is God’s promise to continue providing for our needs. We hear his assurance that God will clothe us so well that we do not need to worry about looking good and that God will nourish us with the worthiness we need live secure in God and not according to other people’s expectations.

    To live in God’s goodness that nourishes and sustains, we have to make a choice. Hence, Jesus’ challenge that we choose between the material to be our security or God. I believe you and I do not want to choose money or material security to be our "god". Hearing Jesus’ teaching, we instinctively know our choice. He voices our yearning to be with God and to rest in him.

    Wise are we who hear in Jesus’ teaching the quiet but sure call he makes to us to be free—free from being caught up in material things, free from letting these determine our everyday decisions, free from making them our life choices. And yes, free from letting these burden us with anxieties.

    Being free to rest, to fall asleep without having to keep awake, to sleep without having to toss and turn is what we all want at the end of a long and tiring day. We can have such rest and sleep if we heed Jesus’ call that we free ourselves from our inordinate attachment to material things. This is how we can be freer to rest disturbed in God alone.

    Let us strive then to hand over more and more of our lives to God, especially the burdensome and painful, the worrying and confusing, those parts of ourselves overwhelmed by material concerns.

    Let us ask God for this grace so that we can look ahead to resting in God alone when our days end but, more so, when our lives end and God beckons us home to him.



    *Inspired by the Trappist monks, Spencer Monastery, Massachussetts

    Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
    photo: from the Internet

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  2. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 6 / Sunday (Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church of St Ignatius)
    Readings: Sirach 15.16-21 / Psalm 118.1-2, 4-5, 17-18, 33-34 (R/v 1b) / 1 Corinthians 2.6-10 / Matthew 5.17-37


    A perfect day.

    Don’t we all hope for that kind of a day? One when everything works out just right. One when all we wish for comes through. One when all that we experience is good and happy. In the words of Lou Reed, have you ever had a perfect day?

    We all dream of that perfect day. More than this, so many of us want to be perfect at what we do. All of us struggle with perfectionism, even the most laid back of us who smile and deny it.

    May be this is why we burden ourselves with many expectations. May be this is why some parents weigh down our school children with unrealistic demands: “no, your A is not good; get that A+, or else”. May be this is why we as society have so many rules and regulations on how we should interact. Is true in church, isn’t it? We want to have so many ministries, organise so many programmes, do so many things so that we have the perfect parish.

    We want all these to achieve perfection because we so often think that it is the mark of distinction. Perfection is what makes one worthy. Perfection is the anti-thesis to sin. Yes, perfect is what we must become.

    But it’s hard to be perfect, isn’t it? You and I know our struggles with perfectionism in everyday life. For some of us the price of perfection is too costly: stress, despair, suicide. 

    We’re not spared this struggle in matters of faith. When we recognise that we are imperfect Christians because we don’t live up to God’s commandments or we fail to observe the Church’s instructions on Christian living, many of us struggle with feelings of unworthiness about coming to Church and the Sacraments, of meaninglessness in religion, and of hopelessness in the faith. These experiences help us understand why some choose to  leave Catholicism and search for God elsewhere, if not to give up on God altogether.

    That is why we must not be so quick to interpret today’s gospel passage as Jesus cranking up the demand that we be perfect. You shall not kill. You shall not be angry with others. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not swear. You shall not. Yes, we hear Jesus teach these.

    A cursory glance at these teachings—based on God’s Ten Commandments— might make us think that Jesus is demanding nothing less than perfection from us, if not more even more perfection for those of us who think we are indeed perfect.

    But what if Jesus is simply calling us to be realistic and to try to live better? To live better one step at a time? To live better than before in each moment we have, and every day that we live? To live better, and not to be fixated with being perfect all at once?

    I believe Jesus is calling us to live better because he knows that no matter how much you and I want to live the perfect Christian life by following God’s commandments, we are human and we will repeatedly sin. We will argue. We will lust. We will gossip. We will get angry. We will lie. We will do all these because we are human.

    But didn’t Jesus call us to be perfect like our heavenly father (Matthew 5.48)?  Yes, he did. And he did, I believe, knowing that our human tendency is to fail, to sin and to be imperfect. So can we ever be perfect?

    I’d like to suggest that we can become perfect by letting Jesus and his teachings shape how we ought to live better, from moment to moment. His teachings are the compassionate, patient and understanding ways God perfects us by helping us to grow in spiritual maturity.

    This kind of growth involves discernment. Discernment is the daily process of faithful conversations with God about how God is labouring in our lives to make us more perfect like Jesus, his son. We discern with Jesus in mind because he is the model of spiritual maturity for the Christian life. He is the only one who has scored 10 out of 10 for living God’s commandments. You and I score much less: some of us score 8 out of 10, many others score 5 out of 10 and still some others score around 2 or 3 out of 10. Whatever our score is, Jesus never gives up on his. He comes, again and again, in God’s love, like he does through today’s gospel, to invite us to improve ourselves. St Paul echoes this call in our second reading: Christians must strive to grow in wisdom to know and live in God’s ways.

    As much as discernment is the way for us to grow in spiritual maturity, we must remember that God never intended his commandments to be a checklist for us to tick off like we do a checklist of do’s and don’ts, a checklist that scores how perfect our actions make us out to be.

    In our first reading, Sirach reminds us that God's commandments are for us to have life. Discernment helps us to recognise and understand this truth. In fact, Jesus teaches us throughout the Gospels that God's commandments are to empower us to live as spiritually mature Christians. Such a person understands that Jesus’ teachings are much more than the rules, the prescriptions, the regulations we so often think they are. They are more properly statements about the values we need to have to live with God and in God's ways, especially those that ask us to respect, care for and uplift others, and so, save ourselves as we do so.

    Today Jesus is teaching us that is it not enough to live by avoiding the technical prohibitions of not committing murder, adultery, swearing and all the “thou shall nots” of the Ten Commandments.* He is challenging us instead to live more pro-actively in God’s ways: to settle our grievances with others, to avoid anger, to be pure of heart, to be trustworthy, and to have integrity. One needs values to live like this. Jesus clearly summarises this other, Christ-like way of living with values when he commands us to turn our cheek and to love the enemy who hurts us (Matthew 5.39), as well as to forgive our enemies not seven times but seventy-seven times (Matthew 18.22).

    This is why the Christian life cannot be about living God’s ways in terms of compliance and reward. It must be about living with God’s values of mercy and compassion, of love and tenderness—values that God uses to perfect us for Christian life. The goal of Jesus’ teaching is to help us imbibe these values to become a spiritually mature person who lives with God by living for others. For St Paul, such a person is blessed with true wisdom that comes from God to live in this way

    Our Baptism calls us to become such persons too. We would be wise then to make today’s psalm our daily prayer to ask God to enable us to become spiritually mature Christians:
    Instruct me, O LORD, in the way of your statutes,that I may exactly observe them.Give me discernment, that I may observe your law and keep it with all my heart.Blessed are we then who follow your law, Lord. (Psalm 118.33-34)
    I believe praying this psalm often opens us up to God. This is how we let God into our lives to perfect us. Perfected in God's ways is how we can live each moment, each day better. 

    Today we celebrate the dedication of our parish church. St Ignatius is our patronal saint. He lived in God’s ways by discerning God’s will constantly. He practiced the Examen to do this. We know the Examen. Quite a number of us practice it. The Examen helps us to become aware of God in our lives and to be thankful for God.

    The Examen is therefore a way to cultivate constant mindfulness of God and God’s good labour of perfecting us to live meaningful Christian lives and to be happy. “Cultivating such mindfulness requires attentiveness and availability. Indeed our whole day, all that we do, all that we think and speak must make our hearts, our minds totally available for God. God longs to give Himself to us; our work is availability”.**  Attentiveness and availability are also what we need as the parish community of St Ignatius to let God perfect us as a church.

    May be when we  can become more attentive and available—individually and as a church—to God, as Ignatius who followed Jesus did, then God can truly perfect us better.  When we recognise this, do not be surprised that God is always blessings us with so much more than that the perfect day we hope for each morning.



    * Tom Purcell, Creighton Daily Reflections
    ** Trappist Monks at Spencer Abbey, MA.


    Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
    photo: a summer day by adrian danker, sj ( in new york city, november, 2012)

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  3. Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 5 / Sunday 
    Readings: Isaiah 58.1-10 / Psalm 111.4-5, 6-7, 8a and 9 (R/v 4a) / 1 Corinthians 2.1-5 / Matthew 5.13-16

    A Tiffany lamp on the sideboard will greet you when you enter my friend’s house. It’s a “hand-me-down” that Joshua received from his father who received it from his father. This stained leaded glass lamp has a botanical design featuring flowers and dragonflies, spiders with webs, green shoots and butterflies.

    But it has a crack. Out of it streams plain yellow light from the bulb, not the scintillating play of coloured light we associate with Tiffany lamps. “It’s still broken”, I’ve often remark about this lamp whenever I visited Josh. “It’s good enough”, he’ll always reply.

    Good enough. This is the Good News in today’s gospel reading: Jesus isn’t asking us to become light; he is saying, “You are the light of the earth”. If this is how Jesus sees us, then we must be for him good enough to be light to brighten someone else’ darkness, light to guide another out of danger into safety, light to offer hope for all suffering in doom and gloom.

    Good enough light for Jesus in spite of how cracked we may be with our faults, broken because of our addictions, damaged by our sinfulness. I’d like to think that Jesus recognizes we are indeed “light of the world” because he looks beyond our soiled, stained and sinful actions to go deep into who we are as God’s creation.

    And going deep, Jesus sees what we so often struggle to admit we see: our potential for goodness. It is that glimmer of our desire to be saintly. It’s that flicker of our kindness to love. It is that incipience of our compassion to care. This is the light Jesus acknowledges and treasures when says to us “you are the light of the world”.

    Often we struggle to see this light because the faults and messiness in our lives dim it. But God sees this light of goodness in us, no matter how faint it is. For God, it is good enough to be set ablazed and to shine for all to see, not hidden away.

    Today Jesus tells us he treasures the light of our goodness for the world. How do you feel hearing this? Joyful? Hopeful? Yes, we may feel like this. But also uncomfortable, I suspect, because we all in some way judge ourselves unworthy to be God’s light for someone else. But are we really so unworthy?

    All of St Paul’s life and work as a Christian was to bring God’s light into the world. Many in history and in art have depicted him in heroic terms. He is the apostle God chose to carry on Jesus’ work, the missionary who proclaimed Jesus’ message far and wide, the Christian who was martyred for his faith.

    Today, we hear Paul describing himself differently. He tells the Corinthians that he comes to proclaim Jesus in “weakness and fear and with much trembling”. These are the words of a Christian who knows his limitations as an apostle yet continues to proclaim Jesus by the power of faith. What allowed Paul to do this?

    What would allow Christians like you and me to proclaim Jesus to the world, like Paul did? Proclaim him as God’s salvation even as we struggle with our weaknesses and fears because we feel unworthy, inadequate, and sinful?

    I’d like to suggest that what will empower us to proclaim Jesus in word and deed, in life and prayer, as Paul did is our confession of God’s vulnerability to be like us. This is because the vulnerability of God to be like us in Jesus, to be inflicted with wounds that crack open the body, is how God’s light comes into our lives and the life of the world.

    For Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, God’s light shines out most of all to us through Jesus’ wounds: “Where have your love, your mercy, your compassion shone out more luminously than in your wounds, sweet, gentle Lord of mercy” (On the Song of Songs, 6i). The light shinning through his wounded body is his mercy, his compassion expressed perfectly through his passion and death for the world and us.

    And nowhere else does this light shine most luminously than on us in our weakness and woundedness. Truly, God’s light meets us in the darkness of our sin, and especially at the hour of our death.

    God’s light falling upon us should enlighten and enliven us with this truth: that we are God’s own, and so, we are much more than sinners. This is why Paul can claim that he strong when he is weak because Jesus is with him (2 Corinthians 2.9-10)—Jesus is God’s radiant light for the world.

    This then is the challenge before us: not how much but how much more of God’s light do I want to let into my weaknesses, my woundedness, my sinfulness?  We would be wise to consider this challenge. Wise because the degree to which we make ourselves open and vulnerable to receive God’s light will be in turn the depth of goodness that will shine forth as our light for the world.

    Only when we let God’s light fill us our innermost depths can accomplish what Isaiah calls us to do in our first reading: feed the hungry; shelter the oppressed and homeless; clothe the naked; never turn our backs on another in need. When we make these acts our Christian way of life, we might discover the brilliance of God’s salvation laboring in us—our wounds will be healed; light will dispel darkness and gloom; the Lord will answer our cries for help—and through us, for the world.

    To live this way is to let our light, however faint, reflect and refract the light from the wounded, mercy-filled Jesus whose open heart and wounds blaze with light of his compassion. Yes, the cracks of our weaknesses, the fissures of our frailties, the wounds of our sins are therefore graced openings: they allow us to receive God’s light, as they also enable us to share this light in us with many others who can then see and glorify God.

    “It’s still broken”, I remarked about the Tiffany lamp when I visited Josh one last time before leaving Boston. “Ah, but its good enough to let the light shine above”, he chuckled. It shone onto a copy of Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son. May be this is why Josh cherishes the crack, as much as God treasures our cracks and us.



    Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore

    Photo: twistedjules.wordpress.com
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"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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