Invitation to Silence (4th Sunday Ordinary B)

During Pope Francis' visit to the Philippines in January of 2015, one of the most moving encounters of the Filipino people with him was perhaps when he invited all to a moment of silence—silence in the midst of the unspeakable remembrance of the agony, pain, loss, and other forms of suffering that had befallen the people of Tacloban.

"Some of you lost part of your families, all I can do is keep silence, and I walk with you all with my silent heart...I have no more words to tell you." These words of Pope Francis revealed how silence has allowed him to show his own limits and humility. But this honest expression of vulnerability has, all the more, humanized the papacy and made him a captivating figure to many people.

For me, such an invitation to silence, coming from a humble Pope, is a reminder that in silence, more than in its doctrinal eloquence, Christianity is in its finest. In silence, Christianity’s compassion for the poor and the suffering becomes pure, honest, and unmistakable.

Few people have discovered the eloquence of silence.  Most people live and have mastered the art of thriving in the noise of anxieties, charting their way to success through the multi-layered pile of tasks, important concerns, and, no doubt, noble responsibilities.  For these people addicted to productive activities, silence is strange.  Silence is unbearably a waste of their precious time.

In today’s gospel (Mk. 1: 21-28), Jesus commanded the man with an unclean spirit to be quiet: “Quiet!  Come out of him!”  Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit this way because he was ranting and raving as Jesus was teaching with authority in the synagogue.  The man with an unclean spirit was resisting Jesus’ authority as he cried out “What have you to do with us...? Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” 

Such is the noise of resistance to God’s authority.  Like the evil spirit, all too often we find ourselves declaring our autonomy from external authorities like God’s. “What have you to do with us?” We are afraid that God might ask us to change and “destroy” our own grand plans in life. We acknowledge his Holiness but we do not trust God enough to allow him to be the God of our lives!  Hence, we keep on ranting, filling our hearts with the noise of resistance.  No wonder, many times we are afraid to be silent.

Today we listen to the Lord as He commands us with authority, “Be quiet!”  Only in that deep state of silence can God speak into our hearts.  I propose the following invitations to silence:

The silence of emptiness.  Cluttered with all our worldly concerns and anxieties, our minds and hearts have no room to offer for God.  We need to de-clutter.  We need to give space for God’s Word to penetrate our hearts.  Silence is an invitation to emptiness.  To be truly silent is to be empty in such a way that our only yearning is to be graciously filled up with the sense of being loved by God. 

The silence of powerlessness.  Satan’s bad habit is to perpetually resist the authority of God.  Satan wants to wield power and to be his own God.  We do feel this evil tendency in us very strongly.  We want to be “the captain of our souls.”  We want to be the ones taking hold of the helm of our fate.  We have to admit, we can be control freaks.  We seem to be disoriented and lost when we are not in control. That is why we resist God’s directions.  We cannot let go. Silence is the courage to be powerless in the face of God. Silence is letting go of our control and being docile to God’s command, “Be quiet! Come out!”  Hence, silence is an invitation for us to give up our futile resistance and let God be the God of our lives.

The silence of peace and harmony.  This is the experience of tranquillity after we have been purged of the “unclean spirit.”  This is the peace that sets in after the convulsions of our defiance.  We seek harmony in life.  We can only attain it by making silence an integral part of our busy lives. We can have peace and harmony when we have replaced our bad habit of harbouring anxieties and resistance in our hearts with the powerful habit of incorporating into our practical lives the eloquent power of silence.  The silence of harmony is like the silences in between the notes of a great musical composition. All those notes fail to form a harmonious melody when they are not woven together by the silences that connect them all. So are the endless concerns in our lives.

The euphoria of the Pope’s visit soon died down. And rightly so, in order that we, in the same silence he called for, may do well to allow his message of mercy and compassion to sink in and become truly an honest impulse in our response to the suffering of the poor.

Cultivating our Faith (Feast of Santo Niño)

There has been a growing awareness even within the Church of a crisis of faith experienced today in many developed countries that were once Christian and have now abandoned the faith in favor of secularist philosophies.  We recall Pope Benedict XVI's letter, Porta Fidei (2011), which called for particular reflection and rediscovery of the faith in response to this crisis [PF, no 4]. 

In the Philippines, one may still claim that the Filipino people have not lost the faith yet.  But signs of secular mindset creeping in are not difficult to notice and are gradually undermining the integrity of faith in Filipino communities and families.  Besides, the faith of a great number of Filipino Catholics needs to move on from being just “sacramentalized” to becoming truly evangelized.

Hence, we continue our commitment to a long and gradual process of deepening our knowledge and appreciation of our Christian faith and to grab every opportunity of living out our faith consciously and of sharing it to the world with joy.

The celebration of the Feast of the Santo Niño is one such opportunity.  How can our devotion to the Santo Niño help us achieve the goal of deepening and strengthening our Christian faith?   I suggest three ways:

Gratitude for the gift of faith. Today’s second reading (Eph 1:3-6, 15-18) should inspire us to be grateful because of the faith we received. St. Paul writes: “Therefore, I, too, hearing of your faith in the Lord Jesus..., do not cease in giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him” (v.15-17).

Our devotion to the child Jesus has to nurture our gratitude for the gift of faith. The feast of the Santo Niño is particularly significant to us Filipinos because it was the image of the child Jesus that was first instrumental to the introduction of Christian faith to us. When we dance the sinulog step, we recall the joy of Hara Amihan, wife of Rajah Humabon, the ruler of Cebu in 1521, as she danced upon receiving the image of the Santo Niño as baptismal gift from Magellan.

Let our celebration of the Feast of the Santo Niño, then, express our gratitude to God for the gift of our faith.  Gratitude is a sign that we just don’t take our faith for granted but we appreciate it and we are conscious of its value and influence in our personal and communal lives. Gratitude for the gift of faith is recognizing the gratuitousness of God in loving us sinners. When we thank God for the gift of faith, we thank Him because we have Him in our lives. Let our devotion to the child Jesus remind us of this.

Nurturing the gift of faith in our children. The Santo Niño represents a child. One reason perhaps why the natives of this land did not resist the faith is the disarming appeal of a child. Jesus Christ himself has always welcomed the presence of the children and has seen in them the qualities of those who should belong to God’s Kingdom.  In Mt. 18:1-5, 10, Jesus called a child over and presented him to his disciples saying, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.”

If Christian faith has to continue to flourish, we need to nurture the seed of faith in our children.  If we fail in this, how can we hope to succeed in sharing the beauty of our faith to grown-ups who have become arrogantly materialistic, astute in electronic technology but spiritually bankrupt?

Our devotion to the child Jesus then should heighten our recognition of the openness of the children to God. Children are very fragile. We ought to take care of them, especially the aspect of their faith and relationship with God. They can easily be destroyed by today’s materialistic trend. God calls all of us for a purpose. We need to nurture that calling in our children early on that they may grow in the path set for them by God and that faith may be their guide in their search for meaning in life.

Maturing in faith by purifying popular piety.  Popular piety may have led some people to flock to the image of the Santo Niño for its supposed ‘lucky charm,’ or ‘miraculous powers.’ While it’s a function of faith to trust in God’s providence to answer our human needs, it is bordering onto fanaticism to assign the divine power to the image of a divinity. While we love the image of the child Jesus, for whatever reasons, it is perhaps a form of fixation to see the person of Jesus only as a child.

Our devotion to the Santo Niño has to help us encounter the whole person of Jesus.  In Luke 2: 41-52, the incident of the losing and finding of Jesus reveals that, as a child, Jesus is already concerned about his relationship with his Father. “Why are you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”   His concern as a child to be in His Father’s house tells a lot about Jesus’ commitment to do his Father’s will.  When we see the child Jesus asserting the utmost importance of doing His Father’s work, it should not be difficult for us to see that this is the same person who reaches out to serve the poor, the destitute, and the oppressed.  He is the teacher who teaches us to love one another and instructs us to forgive as the Father in heaven forgives, i.e., seventy times seven times. He is the same person who agonizes in the garden of Gethsemane as He chooses the path of self-sacrifice that His Father’s design may be accomplished. The child Jesus whom we love so much is the Jesus who has saved us through his total obedience unto death on the cross and His glorification in the resurrection.

Beyond the excitement of dancing the Sinulog steps, our devotion to the Santo Niño has to lead us to the joy of mature discipleship and the challenge of being his witnesses in this changed and increasingly secularized milieu.  May our celebration of the Feast of the Santo Niño be an opportunity for us, indeed, to deepen our faith.

Invitation to Intimacy (2nd Sunday Ordinary B)

Right after Epiphany Sunday which celebrated the joyful truth of God’s manifestation to all nations and to each and every one of us to assure us of his fidelity to the covenant, we can now move on and continue to reflect deeply on this invitation to a loving relationship with this God who communicates and reveals Himself.

This Sunday, we can speak of the invitation to intimacy with God.  For most of us believers, God is present in our lives but great are the odds that we see Him as a distant God watching us from afar or as a God of providence who becomes especially real to us in times of dire need. Today’s readings reveal a God who calls us, who initiates a loving relationship with us, who invites us to intimacy.

God calls us through the voice of restlessness. The young Samuel, in the first reading (1 Sm. 3: 3-10, 19), experiences some restless nights trying to discern whose voice it is that calls him. Twice, he mistakenly believes it is Eli’s voice. Only on the third instance, with Eli’s guidance, that he recognizes the voice of God calling him. In the gospel reading (Jn. 1: 35-42), the first two disciples of Jesus find themselves in a restless search, perhaps, for something to which they can meaningfully devote their lives.  Jesus confronts them: “What are you looking for?”

Restlessness is a universal human experience. At some point in our lives, we all find ourselves searching for something that can give us peace, contentment, and meaning.  This spurs us on to a frustrating exploration in life looking for happiness in money and possessions, in our achievements and honors, in power and influence, in pleasure and easy gratification. Some quite desperately and sadly settle with destructive addictions.  

But restlessness can be the voice of God calling us to Himself.  Like Samuel, we need to listen to God’s voice: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” Or like the first disciples of Jesus, we need to face him and answer bravely his question, “What are you looking for?”  We can be helped tremendously by spiritual guides—like Eli and John who led Samuel and the disciples rightly to the direction of God.  Spiritual directors, as we call them now, can assist us in discerning the voice of God in our experience of restlessness and sorting out the authentic voice of God from many other voices that are there to confuse and mislead us.

God invites us to intimacy with Him. Only in God can our search be over.  As the famous line of St. Augustine’s confession goes: "You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

God desires that we rest in Him, that we spend time with Him.  Again, after Samuel recognized God’s voice and came to Him with an open and listening heart, the first reading states, “Samuel grew up and the Lord was with him.”  In the gospel, the disciples received Jesus’ invitation: “Come and see.”  This is an invitation to intimacy... an invitation to spend time with God and to know Him quite personally... not as a distant God... not as a “spare-tire God” whom we remember only when we are running with a flat tire.

Amid the hurly-burly of our crazy contemporary lives, we experience a growing emptiness or restlessness. If we are not guided properly, we can be very careless and senselessly plunge into an ultimately destructive coping mechanisms and addictions that offer us nothing but bottomless pit of emptiness.

Today’s readings remind us of God’s standing invitation—“Come and see...”  “Be with me...”  “Whatever you do... you can do it with me.”  Our restlessness is but a longing for intimacy with a God who is just too happy to be known and be recognized.  May we sort out, from the many voices that drown us every day, the real voice of God inviting us to intimacy with Him.

God is Not Afraid to Tell Us Who He Is (Epiphany B)

John Powell’s Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? is one of my earliest favorites.  I read this interesting book at a time when I was beginning to feel the need to go out of my shell and find people who would lovingly accept me as I am.  Self-disclosure can be frightening.  In John Powell’s words: “I am afraid to tell you who I am, because, if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it’s all that I have.”  To reveal one’s self openly and honestly takes the rawest kind of courage as one exposes one’s self to a possible pain of rejection.  Yet one will have to risk because only through the process of revealing oneself that one can break free from an even more cruel experience of pain—the prison of isolation. John Powell’s words again come to mind: “To refuse the invitation to interpersonal encounter is to be an isolated dot in the center of a great circle... a small island in a vast ocean.”

We are relational beings.  We wither and perish in isolation. I’m beginning to realize that this is another aspect of being created in the image and likeness of God.  Our God is Himself a relational God.  He is the God of the Covenant.  As such, He cannot be in isolation.  In order to forge a loving relationship with humankind, He has to make himself known.  In Jesus Christ, in that mystery of incarnation we have joyfully celebrated in the season of Christmas, God has definitively revealed himself to human beings in the manner most intelligible to us—as a human being.

Epiphany is the Greek word for revelation or manifestation.  Today’s liturgical celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord calls to mind God’s risky act of manifesting himself to the world.  Indeed, the gospel reading (Mt. 2: 1-12) describes, in that creative story of the visit of the Magi, God’s act of self-revelation and the great irony that accompanied this epiphany in the history of salvation. The Son of God has been rejected by the Chosen People of God, the very people from among whom, ages and ages ago, He was prophesied to come and for whom He was believed to be sent!  Ironically, the wise men from the east, representing the pagan people, were the ones who travelled far and wide in search for the new born King and ended up accepting and worshipping him.  The Lord was rejected by his own people, only to be adored by all nations!

Some points for our reflection:

Self-disclosure and the longing for acceptance. Our relationships, including the relationship with God, are built upon the courageous act of self-disclosure which is met either with rejection or acceptance.  God, who loves us so dearly, cannot but go out of his own comfort zone as God in order to reach out to us in self-revelation.  Any acts of self-manifestation longs for acceptance.  God longs for our acceptance. All too often though, God is met with refusal.  In Jesus Christ, God experienced the utmost rejection on the cross.

In what ways have I refused God’s offer of himself?  King Herod, in today’s gospel, pretended to be interested in searching for the new born King.  But in fact, in his heart of hearts he rejected Jesus as he saw the child as a threat to his power.  King Herod refused to accept Jesus. King Herod was full of himself.  There was no room in his heart for the manifestation of God’s love.  There is room only for his poor self. Is this not the same reason that I refuse God sometimes in my life?  Am I not too full of myself to allow God to communicate his love for me? Am I not closing my heart because of fear that I might lose myself and God might take over the controls in my life?

Beyond the trauma of rejection. God can turn the pain of rejection into the blessing of salvation.  When the Chosen People did not welcome the Messiah, the blessed irony in salvation history transpired.  It was to the gentile world that the glory of the Lord was manifested.  When the Lord was rejected by his own nation, all the nations on earth adored him. In Matthew’s narrative story of the visit of the Magi, the wise men from the east saw his star and understood in it God’s universal invitation for salvation. Hence, the Church today proclaims the revelation of God to the whole world. God reveals and makes Himself known to all men and women.

We can be paralyzed by our traumatic experiences of rejection.  We can spend our lives hiding inside ourselves seeing to it that we will never be hurt again. So we refuse invitations to authentic relationships—sometimes even relationship with God.  But this is the surest way to the prison of isolation. 

Invitation to mutual self-disclosure with God. God allows in himself and in us the experience of being rejected, but he makes sure another door is opened for us.  Epiphany invites us to trust in the God of relationships.  His own act of self-disclosure encourages us to go out of our protective shells and reach out to him and to others.  True worship and adoration can only come from someone and from a people who have the courage to venture out of the familiar self in order to accept the invitation to a mutual self-disclosure with God—the God who is not afraid to tell us who He is.