Angels and Demons
To be sure, this is not a writeup or a review about the movie (which I personally thought was splendid, by the way). Surely, somebody's going to write a book on that novel/movie to debunk all the myths found within it about the (Un)Holy Catholic Church. For what it's worth, I have more to talk about the Church than I have to talk about the movie itself.
After just over ten years of serving a community that calls itself "Christian", "Church", "Body of Christ", "People of God", among many other titles it gives to itself, I find the real personification of the above statue to be a most adequate caricature of the Church.
It is strange how God brings into His fold all kinds of people, from those desiring to be holy to those who are rather content with pure evil. Of the latter, psychologists may call them the emotionally damaged or the psychologically disturbed, but the fact is, they love evil. Or at least, they seem to love being evil. And yes, they're found among God's fold; some even hold prominent positions among His fold.
Someone has recently told me, just after much less than a year of serving in a ministry environment, that he was totally disillusioned by the dynamics of ministry. He had every reason to be. He had higher expectations of people serving in ministry - and rightly so. But people in ministry had failed his expectations.
For centuries, the Church has taught about itself as being at once sinful and holy, at once human and divine. Holy Mother Church has understood, through centuries of her existence, that just as not everyone who is outside of the visible Church is necessarily damned, not everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved.
St Augustine wisely remarks in his homily: "How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!"
Homilies on John, 45, 12
This picture of the statue precisely makes the theological statement that within the Church are to be found angels and demons. But lest we be quick to judge by trying to separate the angels from the demons, intentionally damning the latter, let us remember that in the one body can be found both the faces.
As I ponder on this issue, especially in the face of people to whom I very quickly attribute evil, I've often wondered if I was an angel or a demon. I have now realised... I am both.
If you aspire towards ministry, priesthood, or the religious life, thinking that it would mark the end of your confrontations with worldly evils, you couldn't be more wrong. Very often, that of the world which you try to escape can be found in the Church tenfold in magnitude. And worst of all, it forces you to be confronted by the other side of your face - the demon.
Welcome into the Body of Christ.
Indeed, indeed... it has been an extremely long (almost) two weeks since I visited this blog to say something. After many days of traveling, speaking, meeting people - basically working - I'm now back in my home in Seremban with the family.
Over the past couple of years, one very important lesson I've learned is that some people, because of the extent of their brokenness, have no capacity to live in community. They are dangerous to be with because they threaten to compromise your dignity and value, and at times, actually do.
Holy Week sounds deeply spiritual, doesn’t it? It sounds like a week characterised by tranquility, reflection, depth, ascetism and piety. For many religious Christians throughout the world, perhaps; but it wasn’t so for Jesus.
I admire you deeply for your courage. 
It’s easier to be nice than to love people. 
Marriage is a reflection of the divine friendship of God. It is ordained that the joining of the lives of man and wife reflect the self-giving nature of the Holy Trinity. 
Tonight, I've just been reminded of how you've amazingly chosen to love me despite knowing the many things you'll have to surrender for the cause of the Kingdom. 
“I’ve known you for so many years, and yet you seem to have become closer to this other newer friend more than me.”
One of the realities I've noticed in the past years of living in a community which is intent on living out the life of the Kingdom is that people who don't consider themselves part of the community tend to form all sorts of perceptions about us. These perceptions range from those which look at us with great admiration as if we're exalted heroes of the faith to those which perceive us to be the disdainful freaks we admittedly sometimes make ourselves to look like.
We are created in the imago Dei (“image of God”). For centuries, it has been a point of debate concerning what the imago Dei really means. One speculation after another emerged from the time of the Patristics (who distinguished between the “image” and the “likeness” and posited that the image was retained at the fall but the likeness was lost) right up to the time of the Protestant Reformers (who held that both the “image” and the “likeness” are synonymous and that this image had been distorted at the fall).
Whom do you eat with? The table is a symbol of fellowship. It is where people sit and talk with one another, telling one another stories about their lives and how they’ve come thus far in their journey.
“Don’t let them get too close to you, otherwise they’ll step all over you. Always maintain a safe distance.”
You're doing something to me that no philosophy, no theory, no field of thought in all its splendour of abstraction has been able to do to me... you're making me feel. All throughout this life and faith journey, all these years, I've been fixated on how God must think and how we must think like him. Now you're driving me to experience how God must feel. You're driving me to a measure of vulnerability deeper than I could ever imagine I would experience.
Do you often meet people who seem to be interested in nothing more than small talk? They seem genuinely interested to be in touch with you, but the relationship often revolves around small talk. And even when you try to steer the conversation into something “deeper” by trying to talk about matters that matter, your efforts are flippantly ignored or pushed aside, and the small talk continues.
I've just returned from a weekend on 
The gift of relationships is also a discipline of balance.
Me:
The contents of this post is a reply to Irene's letter: 
So much for good timing. Anyway, it's a good thing you're replying now, as I'm going to hit the road again soon! And no, I'm not enjoying myself with all this travelling. Be my guest; quick go to 
Without friendship, I have no theology to speak about. All I have is an ivory-tower conjecture of what God must be like. There will be no collective experience of God's presence in community, or how God works to shape my life through relational agents that I call friends. The Christian faith has always been a communal faith.
The implications of the recovery of friendship in the Christian life are inexhaustible. The previous posts that point out these implications constitute only a minute sampling of these implications. I invite you to reflect further on what this understanding of friendship might mean for you in your own faith journey.
It is difficult to find the friendship of God revealed in scripture when it is read in the way we have been taught all these years. It is not a problem with scripture itself, but rather, a problem with the lenses that have been given to us in our reading of scripture.
"Church" is a community of friends that is formed by virtue of its people being committed to following Jesus together. We follow Jesus, the Friend. And by virtue of our following him, we are a community of friends.
When God assigned a mission to humankind, his purpose was neither efficiency-driven nor productivity-driven. It was friendship-driven. The assignment of work to humankind was God's invitation to a partnership within the context of intimate friendship. It was friendship, not work itself, that was to result in productivity.
The "gospel of salvation" many of us have received is one that excludes the friendship of Christ. We speak of Christ's work on the cross as necessary for our redemption from sin, but we forget that the whole purpose of God's redeeming us from sin is for the restoration of a divine friendship with him. His primary concern is not so much sin, but rather, friendship. Sin grieves him only because it severs friendship.
The Lord's Supper that is commonly known today among Christians as the "Holy Communion" is more than the institution it has become.
This has certainly been a tediously long series of theological reflection. For this reason, a lot of personal contemplation has had to be undertaken, coupled with the enunciation of my experience of the embodiment of friendship within my own community of people whom I call "spiritual friends". 
Lest anyone should define friendship in its most casual terms, it has to be clarified that Christian friendship is about the laying down of one's life; not just for God, but for one's friends. In the process of learning to love our friends, we learn to lay down our lives for God and for one another. We learn how to love our friends sacrificially; to truly actually live for them.
When we speak of friendship or relationships, we often hear responses such as "Friendship alone isn't going to get us anywhere" or "Relationships alone aren't enough". But when we understand the missional dynamics of friendship, we will see that friendship alone is indeed enough. It is precisely what the world needs.
It is strange how we often almost too easily assume that others are not trying hard enough, or that they simply are refusing to try to live a life that is consistent with Christian ideals. It is somehow difficult to see that, just like us, others are perhaps actually trying to live their lives in the best way they know how. 
God desires friendship not simply because it gratifies his deepest longings. He is himself, by virtue of his Trinitarian existence, the embodiment of friendship par excellence. He therefore needs no friendship beyond that which is already intrinsic to his very nature.
God has a dream. It is a dream to build a Kingdom wherein friendship is restored in its ultimate form. At (what is commonly known to many as) "the Fall", the friendship that God had established between himself and creation was fractured. It pained the heart of God when he lost his friends, for they had walked away from him.
I've waited rather long to announce this, just to be sure that I'd see this train of thought through. As a result of some recent need that I see arising for a coherent understanding of the dynamics of relationships within Christian communities, I will be dwelling on a new and sustained series of theological reflections pertaining to Christian friendship.
