Let’s face it: we all want friends who brighten our day, not friends who darken our day. We want friends who would offer us the best of their times and share their joys with us, not friends who burden us with the weight of their sorrows and sufferings.

After all, why stick our necks out for our friends? As they say, “friends are basically just friends”; we do not expect them to rally around us with support during critical moments of our lives, and neither should they expect that of us.

So much for Jesus defining friendship as being willing to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13), even his own friends were very much fair-weathered friends; at least during his earthly lifetime. They stuck with him when there was much to be gained. But at the worst moment of his life’s horrors, they fled, denied him, and went back to their own careers (which they had left behind for what they had thought was a better career prospect when they had first met him).

We may hate to admit this, but many of us are fair-weathered friends of Jesus. With our lips, we confess him by saying the sweetest things about him. With our hands, we show our piety. But when the gospel confronts us with the predicament of Christ’s sufferings and his call for us to carry the cross, we say we must not be fanatics in following religious teachings. We often refuse to journey with him in his darkest moments.

And then, ironically, when Easter dawns, we rejoice that Jesus is risen! Because at Easter, the weather becomes fair again. But on Easter morning, this Jesus who had been abandoned by his friends appeared before them and showed them his scars soon after saying, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19-20).

Have you wondered why he showed them his scars? Could it be that he might have been telling them, “You did this to me”?

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“I have been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me” (Galatians 2:19-20, NJB).

The whole paradox of the Christian faith reaches its climax at the celebration of the Holy Week. Through the celebrations of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter, the irony of death comes alive. And we, the Easter people, are reminded by the Church once again: we must die in order that we may live.

How much of this has anything to do with our daily lives, if any? It is one thing to believe that Jesus did such a humbly mighty act for us, and another thing to believe that we must actually be foolish enough to be like him. For if we truly desired to be like him, we would be helplessly trampled upon by broods of vipers; it would be difficult to survive in the world. The easier thing to do, therefore, would be to dismiss that Easter reality into the background of our religious lives. At least that would make being Christian more bearable.

Have we so normalised the Christian faith that its body of paradoxes now escapes our sensibilities? And if so, what would being Christian mean anymore?

Many Christians tend to justify their cause in saying that the demands of the gospel should not be carried too far. That is "extremism" or "fanaticism", they say. We are now living the modern life, and this calls for modern renditions of scriptural interpretation. So "moderation" is the order of the day.

The faith of the Easter people calls us to return to true and authentic life in Christ. Parents, in the face of raising up children, are called to mortify themselves over and over again as they deny themselves for their younglings. Husbands and wives continue being called to uphold the sacred promises of their marriage by crucifying their own desires and giving themselves for the wellbeing of each other daily. Servants who serve their masters continue being called to serve in faithfulness so that the light of Christ may shine through their daily dying.

More than that, and worse still, there is a call for us to love the unlovable, to touch the untouchable. It may be easier laying our lives down for those close to us and from whom we receive love. But to give of ourselves to people who may have nothing to give in return, and more so, to people who may even trample upon that which we offer, that is an entirely different challenge.

A rather silly way to live, by the standards of modern wisdom. But the only way to live, for the Easter Christian.

We are a people crucified with Christ and raised with him in baptism, no longer conforming to the standards of the world, being parables of the gospel paradox: we are dead with Christ, therefore, alive in Christ.

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It is very bad luck to speak of the unpleasantries of life during the Chinese New Year. It is a festive season meant to usher in all that is good and beautiful which is due to us throughout the year. Hence, no performing of any rites or utterance of any words that may be a source of a cursed year ahead.

Except that this fourth day of the Chinese New Year is also Ash Wednesday, the first day of our Lenten season. From celebration, there is an abrupt transition into fasting and abstinence. From a fixation on the beautiful, there is a sudden call from Holy Mother Church to a contemplation of one's transgressions.

The dissonance we feel on this occasion is probably a divine conspiracy.

We are inherently lovers of good news. But life is not all good news. There are the realities that we, if given a choice, choose to avoid; those like pain, suffering, sin and fallenness. If we had our choice, we would wish for a Chinese New Year celebration all year round with neither toil nor strife. But now, our attention is turned to ashes.

"Remember, O man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19).

But divine conspiracies always come with a twist. In religious language, we call it a "paradox", something that makes perfect sense only with much spiritual discernment and reflection.

Mother Church desires that we spend the next 40 days (excluding the Sundays, that is) contemplating upon the paradox of how authentic festivity and beauty can be found only through mourning and repentance. The climax of this discovery will then lead us, 40 days from now, to a profound realisation of how it took the devastating fall of man to bring about the glorious redemption of God.

But for now, perhaps it is time to put aside the festive joys of the Chinese New Year, and to begin mourning over the brokenness of our lives. As we dress ourselves with sackcloth and paint ourselves with ashes, we can then expect to soon be clothed with robes of righteousness and adorned with the glory of the resurrected Christ. The point is, without the former, there cannot be the latter.

Let us mourn, for we need a Saviour. Mourn not in helplessness but in hopefulness, for the Saviour will come. He will. For He has promised He would.

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I am the hours
And moments of your yesterday
I am your time gone by
O'er days and ages fleeting,
Long since passed away
As endless years roll by.

I'll rise in the spark of life
The dawn of all time.
I'll call to the world still yet to be.
The music is everywhere,
In life, in the sea and air
To join in the perfect song of all eternity.

I am the hours,
The days and moments yet to come
Until the end of time
All the centuries and
Seasons that are still to run
As endless years roll by.

I'll rise in the spark of life
The dawn of all time
I'll call to the world still yet to be
The music is everywhere
In life, in the sea and air
To join in the perfect song of all eternity.

The noon of creation rings
And all in the heavens sing
The glorious song through all eternity.

I am the dawn of all time.

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Author's Note: This is a post from 2006 which I felt was worth resurrecting.

The people of the world often seem keen to exalt others who can be heroes for them.

Perhaps we live in a disappointed world that seeks hope. Perhaps the haste in exalting "heroes" emerges from a universal human search for a reason to sustain a dream for a better future.

But could it be that "heroes" can be heroes only when they are gazed at from afar? Could it be, if we approached the life of a "hero" in close proximity, that we would find "heroes" to be (after all) the very kind of frail, broken and wounded beings that we are. Could it be that heroes are simply people who have found creatively constructive avenues of coping with and expressing their human struggle?

Could it be that they have become "heroes" simply because we have hurried them to become symbols of hope for ourselves, and that they never intended to become heroes for anyone in the first place? Could they just be "hurried heroes"?

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I absolutely abhor the fact that the places of worship belonging to the Christian community in Malaysia are being violated. It is hurtful and painful, not to mention harmful to the harmony of society. And as a Christian myself, I feel fear when I leave my house. That fear is real.

Inasmuch as the Christian community claims that the word "Allah" has been used by the Arabic Christians even prior to the existence of Islam, I can, to a certain limited extent also understand the fear that sets in among our Muslim neighbours of how the use of God's name by both religions may pose a threat to the purity of their respectable religion. Whether or not the fear on their part is founded on reality and whether the threat is a true possibility or a mere imaginary perception, that fear is real.

Fear begets violence; violence in speech and action. It makes us threaten the dignity, even the lives, of people; an inherent dignity our very religions preach about. Fear makes us want to eradicate the perceived sources of threat. It makes us want to thicken the lines of our boundaries and appear brutal so the perceived source of threat will stay way beyond those boundaries we have established for our safety and significance. So yes, some of them explode our churches to intimidate us, while we speak, condemn, and "pray against" them.

I swear some Christians are praying not because they think God is really going to help them through these trying times; they're praying in defiance, to show the perpetrators that they can have their churches violated but that they cannot have their faith taken away. It is a demonstration of sorts, a silently violent one; a demonstration not of good faith, but of bad faith against those who have harmed them.

We are still in the Christmas season, but the Christ-child is already beckoning us to embrace his passion experience. After all, his own persecution began at his very birth, when his parents had to flee to Egypt because their own king was on a headhunt for this baby. It is that very dimension of Christmas we are challenged to internalise as a People of God at this time of our history.

In times like these, it is difficult to love. It is difficult to uphold the greatest virtue taught in the very religion we seek to protect. But these are precisely the times when we must begin to talk about love. How hard it must be. How necessary it is, that we may preserve the integrity of the Jesus for whom we stand during these difficult times.

"'You have heard how it was said: eye for eye and tooth for tooth... You have heard how it was said, you will love your neighbour and hate your enemy... But I say this to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you..."

~ Jesus, Son of God ~

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I was having bedside chat with my little 8 year-old nephew tonight. It went like this:

Nephew: Sigh... my life is very difficult...

Me: Why is that?

Nephew: Because I can't get everything I want.

Me: What do you want that you can't get?

Nephew: I want maaaaany things. But I can't get them.

Me: What are they?

Nephew: I want a DS, I want a PS, I want a DVD player of my own, I want a CD player, and many other things. But I can't have all of them.

Me: Yeah, I know what you mean. There are also many things that Uncle Sherman wants but cannot have. The same goes for your daddy and mummy.

Nephew: Huh???

Me: Yes. You think grownups can have everything we want eh? Not true. But we have learned to be contented with what we already have.

It was a big life lesson for this cute little man tonight. He thought that grownups always have what they want.

And so begins this little boy's lifelong search for rest - rest from desire. And one day, he may perhaps discover that the only thing that can quench the deepest desire in man's heart is, as St Augustine said, GOD.

Even some grownups never manage to find that rest they seek, hopping from one object of desire to another, eventually turning themselves into what St Augustine called "human wasteland" (regio egestasis).

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will be restless until we find our rest in you."

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I'm accompanying a friend who's hosting a group of international guests in Malaysia; they're due to speak and present at a conference on ecumenical and interreligious ministry this weekend in Kuala Lumpur.

My friend is hosting them by taking them for a whirlwind visit to some of the most well-known religious sites all around Peninsular Malaysia. And we've just been visiting a very famous temple up north. In fact, I'm seated right outside that temple this very moment while the group of them take a hike up the higher plains of the structures.

Just a moment ago, we stepped into The Hall of the Thousand Buddhas. It was fascinating and awesome. But something broke my heart: I caught sight of a woman kneeling earnestly kneeling before the statue of the Buddha and she was in tears. She was obviously pleading for mercy and help to cope with a stormy season of her life.

I believe that just as God honours people who earnestly seek Him with sincere hearts, no matter what their conceptions of Him might be, He also hears their cries for mercy and help. Even if humankind, through failure to recognise the full revelation of God, bow before images that may bear little resemblance to the only One who saves - Jesus Christ - God is merciful.

As this woman continues praying earnestly for God's help to bring her through the winters of life, I also pray that God will strengthen me with strength to go through the pains of ministry I'm experiencing now.

I silently ask Him for wisdom to distinguish between battles He desires for me to fight and those which aren't for me to engage in. I think I may have unwittingly engaged in some meaninglessly vain battles which have absolutely no value to His Kingdom. And I'm sorry.

We all intrinsically tend to embrace our sense of the divine with the most broken parts of our lives. Maybe it's because we know we can find real hope in things that are beyond us. I think this is precisely what God requires of us when we approach Him - the acknowledgement of our paralysis in life.

My prayer: Lord, here I am, your humble servant, weak, paralysed and wretched. With the little use that you have for me, I offer myself to you.

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My heart goes out tonight to all Bishops, Priests and Deacons of the Church, all the ministers called of God to die unto themselves in ways that often cannot be recognised by others.

When a man obeys and honours God because he truly desires to do so, he is a faithful child, a beloved servant. But when a man continues in his resolution to obey God despite his no longer desiring to do so, he is a martyr.

When he can no longer find traces of God's presence in his life and experiences nothing less than darkness, when prayers are lifted up to heaven only to fall back upon him like rain, and yet he continues walking the path of faithfuless, his salvation draws near.

When you suffer for the Kingdom in ways that people cannot even identify, and when your groans and moans fall on deaf ears because people deny you the privilege of recognition as a sufferer for God, you have truly embraced the way of Jesus Christ.

When you find yourself suffering but are unable to say it to anyone except to yourself, and when even God doesn't seem to have absorbed the agony transmitted in your prayers, you are the parable of all the saints who have trodden down the same painful path of salvation before.

Most Holy Mother of God, pray for us, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

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One night I had a wondrous dream.
One set of footprints there was seen,
The footprints of my precious Lord.
But mine were not along the shore.

But then some stranger prints appeared.
And I asked the Lord, “What have we here?
Those prints are large and round and neat
But Lord, they are too big for feet.”

“My child”, He said in somber tones,
"For miles I carried you alone.
I challenged you to walk in faith.
But you refused and made me wait."

“You disobeyed, you would not grow.
The walk of faith you would not know.
So I got tired and got fed up.
And there I dropped you on your butt."

“Because in life there comes a time
When one must fight and one must climb,
When one must rise and take a stand,
Or leave their buttprints in the sand.”

Author unknown.

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I was around the city area of Singapore yesterday afternoon. I decided to attend the celebration of the Mass at the Cathedral at 1.15 pm.

There at the Mass, I noticed a very young man (probably in his early twenties) who was evidently a student from the university across the Cathedral. Carrying a backpack and two books in his hands, formally dressed, he took his seat most reverently at the Cathedral.

At the Holy Communion, he received the body of Christ in his hands with such reverence and caution - hence the deep impression his gesture had left on me.

Coincidentally, I had an appointment to have lunch with a couple of friends at the food court of the university across the road after Mass. And as I entered the food court and was about to take my seat, there was this young man again. He had bought his lunch and was carrying it to his seat.

As my friends went to get lunch for me, I had nothing to do. So I further observed him. He carefully placed his lunch on the table, took his seat, clasped his hands together, closed his eyes and with his head deeply bowed, prayed for two whole minutes. And then he made the sign of the cross, and began to eat. In that noisy food court where countless numbers of other university students were making merry, there was an aura of reverence even in this young man's eating.

So he finished his lunch as mine began. As he walked out of the food court, I was quite tempted to approach him to ask him for his name. After all, we had just partaken from the one body of the Lord just a moment ago.

But I decided that I'd leave it at that, so that the story of this unknown young man could be an anonymous story of inspiration to many other young people like him.

Today, there is hope. For among the countless young who make little out of life, there is at least one young man in the world who seeks God with all his heart despite the disruption of affluence and the temptations of success surrounding him.

The sad thing is, this young man was very likely a misfit among his peers. All other young people in that food court were gathered in intimate clusters; he was the only one sitting alone. He probably did not fit into the way of life prevalent among his peers; because he treasured the holy life.

So there he sat all alone, like a pearl among swines, that would soon be trampled upon. Like the Master whom he serves.

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Easter isn't over yet, contrary to the notion of many of our non-Catholic friends. The Easter season lasts for 50 days, beginning from Easter Sunday and ending on Pentecost Sunday.

There is yet more to be pondered over, more to be reflected upon, more to be said about the Christian experience of the paschal mystery. It's a journey.

These two past Easters have been among the most intense Easters I've ever had. Last Easter was intensely painful. This Easter intensely joyful. I consider the past Easter and this Easter the two landmarks of a singular journey into the mystery of God, like two bookends.

What began as a pain of separation, isolation, and condemnation has now been turned into a joy of discovery, reunion, and communion. What stood in the way of the resurrection of the heart stands in the way no more. The scars remain as witness to the paschal sacrifice, but life glows as witness to the restoration of life.

Many things in our lives stand in the way of truth. The very things sanctified by God - relationships, vocations, marriage, family, work, material goods - may just be those things that keep us from recognising truth in its greater fullness. When these things drive us to a fear of loss, their sanctifying value diminishes; of what good is it if a man gains the whole world but loses his soul?

This is why the season preceding Easter, i.e. Lent, was instituted, so that we might crucify those things we fear to lose together with the fear of loss itself. And when that is brought about, the springtime of the heart truly begins.

And when the springtime of the heart begins, Easter begins with the singing of the excultet summoning all creation to rejoice in the work of the mighty Redeemer to reconcile all creation back to Himself, that He might present creation to the Father. The glory of this Easter evening never ends.

Every Christian baptised into the One Body of Christ Jesus carries with him/her a personal Easter story. What's yours?

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Confessions of a Roman Legionnaire

Sherman Kuek, SFO
Published in Catholic Asian News
(March 2009 Issue)

Good Friday wasn't such a good Friday for me; I was working. I happened to be on duty, and so my colleagues and I were tasked with the arduous job of crucifying three condemned criminals.

Not that it was a big deal for us. Crucifying someone wasn't something novel in our day. Sure, pinning these hopeless delinquents to crosses was a tiring job, but we had done it so much we were extremely skilled in the trade.

After countless exercises, we were able to do it with the least possible sentiment of pity in our hearts for the victims. After all, they were nothing more than the worst scum of the earth; the barbaric act of brutal crucifixion was specially designed for these deserving ones.

But one of the three men we crucified on Good Friday was rather different from the norm, which gave a rather bizarre twist to my day at work.

This Jesus of Nazareth was an interesting guy. He had guts. He was put to stand before our Roman governor, Pilate, and was given a chance to clarify his position about himself.

Yet, when asked if he was king of the Jews, he answered, "You've said it yourself", as if purporting that Pilate had just made a true confession about who he really was. It appeared that he had no idea of the fate that would potentially befall him.

The relationship between this Jesus and his people deeply intrigued me. I never understood why a mob of Jews would turn their own "prophet" to the secular government to be executed in the most gruesome way when just a week before, they were hailing him as the next king.

One moment they were waving palm leaves at him, giving him the royal treatment; but now, hardly a week later, they were shouting "Crucify him!" If they really believed he was their prophet, why did they resort to hating him?

I also found it rather odd that when Pilate asked, "Shall I crucify your king?", the chief priests answered, " We have no king but Caesar". I had thought that all the while, those people had been awaiting a king who would dethrone Caesar and take his place. And yet the chief priests were repelled enough by Jesus of Nazareth to make such a confession. This Jesus must have had some measure of influence that was deemed overly threatening to the chief priests.

They even went to the extent of inciting the crowd to demand that Jesus be crucified. Pilate, who could not find any reason to crucify Jesus, had to yield to their demands. But his conscience did not permit him to bear the guilt of this punishment soon to be inflicted upon Jesus.

This was the irony of the situation: even Pilate had a conscience, which was more than I could have said about the chief priests. With this, he washed his hands before the mob and told them, "I'll not be held responsible for this man's punishment; it's your responsibility". The furious mob replied with such frightful hatred, "Both we and our children will take the responsibility"! It's strange what a little political propaganda can do to an unsuspecting crowd.

So there; they wanted him dead, and Pilate had to oblige for the political wellbeing of the Empire. What followed was a series of excruciating punishments we were ordered to put him through, coupled with some others which my colleagues did out of spite towards the Jews.

We began by whipping him. We whipped his back at least forty times with a whip made up of multiple leather strips. At the end of each strip was a sharp piece of bone or glass attached to it, so that it would sink into the skeletal muscles when the whipping was done. And when the whip was pulled out, these sharp ornaments would yank the flesh out together with them. By the end of the whipping, his spine was virtually visible.

Next, we dragged him to the Praetorium and all my colleagues on duty surrounded him. Since he had claimed himself to be king, they decided to have some fun by painfully humiliating him. They stripped off his clothes and put a purple robe around him to give him a "royal" look. Then, they twisted a crown of thorns and pressed it into his skull. When the sap of those thorns seeped through his skull into his bloodstream, it caused him serious mouth irritation, chronic abdominal pain, and blistering.

They put a staff in his right hand and started paying homage in mockery. How's that for a kingly treatment? Some of my colleagues then kept using that staff to hit him on the head repeatedly.

When they decided that they had had enough fun, we led him to Golgotha, initially with a 50-kilogramme beam resting on his fleshless back. When he could no longer bear the weight of the beam, someone else had to carry it for him.

At Golgotha, we began pinning his hands and feet to the cross using 7-inch nails. When we stood the cross up, he was literally hanging on it with his entire body weight resting on the three nails that had been hammered into his wrists and feet. Imagine what it must have felt like to have the nails tearing through the nerves between the bones of his hands and feet. The relentless throbbing pain must been terribly excruciating; but we were quite used to such a sight.

The crucifixion was really a usual routine for me. But there was something really different about crucifying Jesus of Nazareth: I wasn't as sure as the chief priests that he was guilty of the charge.

All I knew about him was that he was a man who had made a claim about himself which he refused to retract; and I'm not sure such a claim deserved punishment by death. But it was surely foolish of him to have refused to retract it when he was given the chance to do so before Pilate. He must either have been a liar or a lunatic - or could it be that he was, after all, God?

At the crucifixion, I noticed all kinds of people standing around the cross. Some were weeping profusely, their hearts torn at the sight of an innocent man having to suffer such agony. Others were sneering, as if that crucifixion had made their day. These sneering ones obviously felt Jesus deserved the kind of punishment he had received. And yet others were just indifferent, like it was any other day, any other crucifixion. At the foot of that cross, one was able to see humanity in all its diverse dispositions.

One person I noticed in particular was Jesus' mother, Mary. She was a haggard looking woman in her late 40s, who had obviously been through much more in life than the average mother. She was gazing intensely at her son on the cross, weeping softly and gently although there were no more tears left to wet her eyes.

On her face, I saw a look of adoration towards her son, as if she had known this was the fate he had to suffer for the greater good. Her countenance showed no sign of shame that her son had been so condemned by society, no sign of regret that she had been chosen to be his mother. At the cross, she was attending to him. At Golgotha, whilst many others had fled from Jesus, she mothered him.

Even as one who was not a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, I realised that the scandal of his crucifixion obligated people to seriously ponder over their allegiance to him. For those who had followed him for several years prior to this event, his crucifixion must have felt like such a defeat, such an injustice. They would have been haunted by the despairing thought that following Jesus was probably the biggest mistake of their lives.

Is there really much hope in such a gruesome event? I guess that's possible.

You see, some really bizarre things happened just after Jesus released his last breath and died. There was an earthquake. And we were shocked out of our skins when we saw tombs breaking open and saw supposedly dead people walking out of those tombs! Even some colleagues of mine who had mocked Jesus and hit his head with the staff couldn't help but confess, "Surely, he was the Son of God!"

As for Jesus, we couldn't find his body anymore three days later. And his followers all over the towns and the villages claimed that he had risen, and for them, this was the sign of hope. They claimed that his coming back to life was a sign of a hope for every cross they had to bear in their own lives.

I never became a follower of this Jesus. I remained faithful to my duty as a soldier of the Empire and to my god, Caesar. But I must say, the way Good Friday had turned out was absolutely unexpected.

Could this man truly have been the Son of God?

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I've just returned from a very brief but extremely intense retreat.

Within just over 24 hours, we had reflected upon Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. We had also reflected on salvation history - the story of creation and how God once again initiated a series of covenants with man and woman so that they might enter into his gift of salvation.

All these reflections were done that those who were about to be baptised at the Easter Vigil next week would come to a deeper realisation (and internalisation) of their call into the mystical Body of Christ. As for those who were already a part of this community called Catholic, it was a reminder and re-experiencing of their baptismal covenant with God and the community.

The Elect, a name given by the Church to those about to be baptised into the faith, were intensely reminded of what it meant to be followers of Jesus Christ. They were told in this retreat, over and over again, that they had to be willing to carry their crosses to follow Christ, that they have to crucify themselves that they might die with Christ and be raised with Him in baptism.

The Elect were told that in this life, they could and should expect to receive suffering and pain, and be willing to take the higher way of being disempowered, being lesser people, being the losers, being last, and being seen as odd failures in a world that was walking in the opposite direction. Basically, being like Jesus.

I remember how I used to preach this in some Protestant communities when I was a Protestant. Many times, I was told that I had carried the gospel too far and taken scriptures too literally. The gospel was an ancient book and had to be reinterpreted in a modern context, they said.

This was certainly not the gospel I've heard throughout this retreat. In this retreat, once again, I call to mind the baptismal calling of all followers of the Way.

A blessed Holy Week to you, my friends who are carriers of the cross. And more so, to my friends who stand at the door of the Church as the Elect of God, awaiting the glorious day of their spiritual resurrection and baptism into the Body of God's Faithful.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
And blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.

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Here is a homily given by a Jesuit priest from the Klang Valley on 18 January for the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B:

The first reading gives details of Samuel’s calling. He played a big part in the building up of Israel. Through him, Israel entered a new era because it was through him that Israel got her first kings. The Gospel describes the call of Andrew, John and Peter. In this vocation story, Peter’s call is highlighted to reflect his importance in early Christian history and is the basis for the Catholic teaching of what we know to be an important ministry for the Church: The Petrine Ministry concretely expressed through the Ministry of Pope Benedict XVI.

Today the theme centres on God’s call and our response. However, vocation, that is, God’s call and our response, is often understood in terms of calling to be a priest or a religious brother or sister. As a result of a restricted definition of vocation, Catholics tend to exalt the vocation to the priesthood and religious life and to downplay the importance of the non-priestly or religious vocations. The truth is: baptism is a response to God’s call and so it involves every Christian.

Our first call is to life. Baptism calls us to a life in Christ Jesus our Lord. This life in Christ Jesus is spelt out by St Paul in the 2nd Reading in terms of purity of the body, that is, through abstention from fornication. Through Baptism, the body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit and as a result, there is need to give due reverence to the body—living or dead. This explains why we incense the congregation during Mass at the moment we enter into the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Also at the end of a funeral Mass, the body in the coffin is incensed. And, because the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Church prohibits the scattering of the ashes of a faithful departed who has been cremated.

Baptism is so serious a matter that in the early Church it takes place only after a prolonged period of initiation into the life of the Christian community. The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus describes this period in terms of 3 years in what is known as the catechumenate. This long period of waiting for baptism shows how seriously the Church takes the call of Baptism to be.

Baptism takes us into the life of Christ. It is in the context of our life with Christ that we may speak of the call to become a priest or religious. But, priesthood or religious is a particular call which does not diminish the importance of any other vocation or state of life.

Baptism is both a call and a response.

Granted that not everyone here is inclined to run to the seminary or the convent, how are we to step up to the mark?

The Catechism speaks of the relationship between the priesthood of the ordained, that is, the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of the laity.

The common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace - a life of faith, hope and charity, a life according to the Spirit. The ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians.

[The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1547]

If the priest is ordained to help a lay person to live out his or her baptism, this means that every vocation is important.

It means that we first take what we do with great humility. In the context of the Gospel, take a look at John the Baptist. If we think that vocation is to become an ordained priest then we will think of anything else as less. But John the Baptist did not feel his vocation any less. He simply stated: “Look, there is the lamb of God” and pointed Andrew and the other disciple to Jesus. The ordinariness of John’s vocation tells us that life is often lived in someone else’s shadow. Not everyone will be a CEO or will have his or her picture in the papers.

Once, I received an email, which was sent to quite a number of people by a self-serving community leader. Unfortunately, for that leader, I was accidentally included in the mailing list. The content of the email is not important but it was revealingly indicative of the way we perceive vocation. We seemed to have attached glamour to the vocations which are more prominent or visible... like becoming a priest or becoming a leader who must be seen to be taking charge of things. It is only worthwhile to serve if we stand in the lime-light.

But life is not described as mundane for nothing because there are vocations that are by and large hidden and unglamorous, just like John the Baptist whose life’s motto was “He must increase, I must decrease”. For John, life has always been in the shadow of Jesus. Even then, there was no less dignity in being the herald of Christ.

For a Jesuit too, after a long life of service (actually after a life of long service) and after all the publicity of the vocation is gone, he will enter a period of inaction characterised by nonentity. He becomes nobody. In our Jesuit catalogue, what appears next to the name of this Jesuit will not be, “Parish Priest”, “Director of Retreat House”, “Treasurer” but simply “Praying for the Society of Jesus and the Church”. These Jesuits are also those who are aged, sick or dying. But, what they do is no less important that the Jesuit who is quote left and right and courted by the intelligentsia.

To those whose lives are neither exciting nor dramatic, this Sunday marks ordinary time. The call and response of Peter, Andrew and John is a reminder that ordinary time is not less than extraordinary. Ordinary is by and large characteristic of our vocation or state of life. It means that where we are, no matter how hidden, we may be able to give praise and glory to God. But that can happen only if we believe that our vocation is the living out of our grace of baptism, the grace of a life with Christ Jesus our Lord.

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Mary, the Mother of the Church, is not God. But our admiration abounds for the tenderness with which she approached God, the willingness with which she cooperated with God for the sake of mankind's salvation, and the sacrifice with which she gave of herself and continuously gives of herself in intercession for her children.

The two modern Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church are of course fodder for ecumenical disputes. But what most Reformation-based Christians have forgotten is that the two ancient Marian dogmas - the dogma of the theotokos, the Mother of God, and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary - were promulgated as early as the Third and Fifth Ecumenical Councils respectively. These were supposedly Church Councils whose decisions we all share in common, save for the Oriental Orthodox Churches who recognise only the first three Councils as being of ecumenical nature (even so, they hold on to the validity of these dogmas).

Looking beyond these dogmas, there is something of the spirit of Mary that the follower of Christ needs to capture. From Mary, the model of discipleship par excellence, we learn this: there is a certain tenderness of heart that is called for in discipleship.

It was she who, in all humility, said "Be it unto me according to your word" when the impending conception of the Lord Jesus Christ was announced to her. Truly, she was the favoured one of God, chosen to bring the Saviour into the world. Not because she was worthy, but rather, that she was made worthy of the promises of God.

Contrary to much of that for which feminists battle today (the right to behave like men, etc), Mary was and is the model of a woman that most deeply pleases the heart of God. She was and is blessed among women, and is a tender woman honoured by all men.

Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
And blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God,
Pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.

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It's the Chinese New Year's Eve today, marking the last day of the year, which will lead to the first day of the new Lunar Year for all Chinese (and Chinese descents, like the Vietnamese) from all over the world.

It is common tradition for Chinese families to have a reunion gathering every New Year's Eve, where they have sumptuous dinners and wish one another prosperity and long life. But here's the thing: I don't think I'm truly Chinese in the purest sense of the word. I'm Chinese by biological descent. But actually, I think I'm really British, other than the little vestiges of Chinese culture that may still be found in me if you search really hard.

After decades of living under colonial rule, my parents no longer represent the typification of the Chinese people. They hardly can speak the Mandarin language, and our first language is English. We're better acquainted with Shakespearean literature than we are with Journey to the West (西游记 - okay, I've just copied and pasted these words, so you get the point).

Furthermore, it's only in recent years that my family has began cultivating the traditional practice of New Year's Eve reunions. Can't blame anyone about that, really; my parents are the reason why I'm British. They survived the era of colonial imperialism. But they're unapologetic about it.

One of the things I'm beginning to discover as we go through these annual reunions is that parents truly desire for their children to be present at these reunions. They experience a sense of reassuring comfort when their children seem to remember where they have come from and do not fail to return to their roots when the occasion calls for it.

In the same way, the Christian faith is not so different. The one thing that God had always to remind Israel was this: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt". He wanted the Israelites to never forget this fact, that they might be rooted in this identity of being a people belonging to a God who had delivered them from slavery. It was only when they had kept this momentous historical event in mind that all the Commandments of the Lord would make sense for them.

So if not for anything else, this is what the annual New Year's Eve reunion gatherings have meant to my imperialised mind - a call to remember my roots. If I have no memory of what it means to be truly Chinese, at least I have a memory of what it means to have been a part of the people of God, delivered from a life of separation into a life in His eternal Kingdom.

To all of you, my friends who are real Chinese - a Very Blessed Year of the Ox.

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Next Sunday will mark the first day of the new liturgical year, beginning with the season of Advent leading to Christmas and beyond.

I'm excited at the things that will be taking place next year, particularly the Easter Vigil when my wife and parents will be received into full communion with the Catholic Church. But for now, let's leave the future to the future.

Yesterday was the Solemnity of Christ the King, which marked the last day of the liturgical calendar of the Church. In a sense, for some of us, Christ is already truly King. But in another sense, that lordship is yet to be realised in its fullest sense.

In commemorating the solemnity of Christ the King, the Church looks forward to more than a mere political reign of Christ over the universe. We look forward to the establishment of ultimate justice, the pervasion of eternal peace in the world. And that is why we look forward to the coming of the King.

We seek the coming of the day when all creation will be renewed, recreated, revitalised, rebeautified, all this to become a new heaven and a new earth.

This solemnity provokes us to reflect on how the world invariably falls short of justice and equality, of how people are still so polarised by their differences in race, religion, sex, education, and social class regardless of how the human race claims to be more progressive than ever before. It is the day when we are reminded of how the Church longs for the coming of the day of the Lord, when all such discrimination and bias will dissipate from the face of the earth.

Peace. Authentic peace and harmony between humanity and God, among humanity, and between humanity and all creation - this is what we long for. And inasmuch as the world has tried to bring about the realisation of these hopes in various ways, our efforts often end up leading to more varied forms of polarities.

Because peace and harmony are truly possible only when Christ is King.

A Blessed Regnum Christi to all of you. I hope it has been a fruitful year for you. May we continue to look to Mary our Mother and the angels and saints for their constant prayers for us pilgrims in our journey towards the day when Christ will truly be King in the most visible way possible.

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For those who desire to truly walk within the will of God and the pattern of the Kingdom, there are always two voices calling out to us.

One voice spurs us to strive towards a success of doing: to attain, to reach for the sky, to find significance, to command honour, to earn all that is good and well-deserved.

The other voice whispers for a success of being. But this success of being requires a considerable sacrifice in our success of doing.

There is a trade-off between the two dimensions, because our preoccupational capacity does not permit for a mutual focus upon the two.

In these past several days, the second of the two voices has gripped my interior attention more than it usually has, although it never ceases to speak in tones no louder than a mere whisper.

The specific manner in which I feel the need to embody this gravitation is to learn what it means to be doing the dance of life with people who, although being no less superior in dignity than my own, are often defined as being so by society. More than just being seen associating with them, I sense a beckoning towards the acceptance of such people as a part of my own fraternal spiritual family.

I do not like what I feel, but I feel the voice ceaselessly beckoning. It is a voice that bids me to keep drifting towards the goal to die to the self, to no longer be bound by the clutches of a fear of whom I am being seen with.

The voice is not calling me to be among them that I might cultivate a discipline of tolerance. Rather, it speaks with conviction, telling me that the lesser people - the mentally deranged, the emotionally disturbed, the economically disempowered, the helpless aged, the socially displaced - are God's path for my salvation. It says I need them.

All this, so that I may know what I am - nothing.

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I'm observing a camp for tertiary students at the moment (yes, as in now).

As always, it begins with ice-breaker games. And they're playing this game now, consisting of several groups competing to see which one can form the longest line using the possessions they have on themselves.

When we begin unloading our possessions one by one, lining these things up in a straight line, then we will begin to see just how much we have on ourselves. It's frightful.

The Christian is called to a life of kenosis, self-emptying and self-denial. It is a life of dispossession, unloading, and the lightening of the self.

Get real... it takes guts to live a life of dispossession. Got guts?

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More than a few Christians I know see Superman and a number of other comic heroes as avatars of the the Christ archetype; the proverbial losers.

Clark Kent, for the sake of identifying with the human race, has to hide his powers and allow himself to be treated like a total loser. His adopted father tells him:

You were made for much more important things than just winning football games.

The Church contains within her depositum fidei a record of thousands of people we hail as saints. They are venerated and hailed as heroes of the faith, those who have crossed over to the other side of the Church triumphant.

But if we examined their lives carefully enough, we just might find a vast many Christ archetypes, proverbial losers who pursued a faith in Christ which necessitated that they void themselves of all significance and heroic inclinations.

To learn the discipline of silence even if you might be the most articulate of all preachers and rhetorists. To exercise the discipline of passivity even if you have muscles strong enough to crush a giant. To learn to submit even if you have the authority to lord it over others. To learn to be nothing even though you know you are something.

This is the mystery of heroism. One must discover that one cannot yield joy and self-significance from being a hero. Heroism is a path of torment, a path of suffering, a path of total self-denial, a ridiculous way of being that one must embrace. Only then can one be a true hero. To be a true hero is to save the world in ways the world cannot recognise.

Heroism and stardom do not get along. Heroes aren't people who win football games. They're made for much more important things than winning football games.

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If there is one thing gone wrong with Christianity now, it is that it has become a showy religion. We go for the big stuff, the grand stuff - concerts, lightings, crowds, charismatic rhetorists, and massive buildings. We fancy our Christian organisations as being highly sought after, making a great impact in society, changing lives, all in the name of "doing great things for the Lord".

Even for some of us who come from very liturgical traditions, we are taken in by the glory and the glitter of other non-liturgical traditions that model themselves after giant corporations through almost perfect concoctions of psychological theories, management skills, and marketing strategies. The way some of these liturgical traditions are aping the other "happening" Christian groups is unmistakable.

The Church as become a capitalistic marketplace, creating its niche and competitive advantage in order to create a demand for itself.

For all those times that Jesus withdrew from the crowds and all those times that He revealed His glory only to a very selected audience, we are reminded that the Christian life is not about the glory and the glitter. It is about the richness of the hidden inner self, which needs to be cultivated in secret and away from public eye.

We are challenged to withhold our "capabilities" from being exposed for self glory. We are called to understand the difference - the very subtle difference - between witnessing and showing off.

Jesus bids the Christian to come and cultivate the hidden inner life which can happen only in secret, that through our hidden inner lives, His true glory and the glitter of the Kingdom might be revealed as a reality bigger than ourselves. May the witness of the Spirit within us forbid that we might somehow be mistaken that we are the ones who have been responsible for the magnificent manifestation of the Kingdom of God in this world. For really, we are nothing.

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A monk is a man who has freed his intellect from attachment to material things and by means of self-control, love, psalmody and prayer cleaves to God.

He who has renounced such things as marriage, possessions and other worldly pursuits is outwardly a monk, but may not yet be a monk inwardly. Only he who has renounced the impassioned conceptual images of these things has made a monk of the inner self, the nous.

It is easy to be a monk in one's outer self if one wants to be; but no small struggle is required to be a monk in one's inner self.

St Maximos the Confessor

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Vatican, Jun. 6, 2008 (CWNews.com) - Church leaders in Asia must find ways to touch the "innate spiritual insight and moral wisdom in the Asian soul," Pope Benedict XVI said during a June 6 meeting with bishops from Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.

The Pope told the Asian prelates, who were finishing their ad limina visit to Rome, that "you are sowing the seeds of evangelization on fertile ground." He explained that "the peoples of Asia display an intense yearning for God," leaving Christian evangelists with the challenge of bringing the Gospel message into the context of Asian traditions.

"In particular," the Pope said, "you need to ensure that the Christian Gospel is in no way confused in their minds with secular principles associated with the Enlightenment." As Asian cultures struggle with the intellectual results of the Enlightenment, he said, Christians should offer an alternative that combines a deep sense of reverence and the transcendent with a commitment to human rights and freedom.

Pope Benedict remarked that the bishops he was addressing, who form a single episcopal conference for purposes of administrative convenience, lead local churches in countries with very different approaches to the issue of religious freedom. The Church should insist on respect for religious liberty, he said, while actively pursuing dialogue with other faiths and striving to reach accord on "the law written on their hearts."

[ Taken from CWNews ]

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VATICAN CITY, JUNE 6, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Christianity isn't a mere foreign import that is alien to Asian culture, but rather the truth that resonates with the law written on the human heart, says Benedict XVI.

The Pope said this today upon receiving in audience today the bishops of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, in Rome for their five-yearly visit.

Quoting the apostolic letter "Ecclesia in Asia," the Pope said, "The Church's faith in Jesus is a gift received and a gift to be shared; it is the greatest gift which the Church can offer to Asia."

He continued: "Happily, the peoples of Asia display an intense yearning for God. In handing on to them the message that you also received, you are sowing the seeds of evangelization in fertile ground.

"If the faith is to flourish, however, it needs to strike deep roots in Asian soil, lest it be perceived as a foreign import, alien to the culture and traditions of your people."

"You are called to present the Christian faith in ways that resonate with the 'innate spiritual insight and moral wisdom in the Asian soul,'" the Holy Father added.

False illumination
Benedict XVI continued: "In particular, you need to ensure that the Christian Gospel is in no way confused in their minds with secular principles associated with the Enlightenment.

"On the contrary, by 'speaking the truth in love' you can help your fellow citizens to distinguish the wheat of the Gospel from the chaff of materialism and relativism.

"You can help them to respond to the urgent challenges posed by the Enlightenment, familiar to Western Christianity for over two centuries, but only now beginning to have a significant impact upon other parts of the world."

"While resisting the 'dictatorship of positivist reason' that tries to exclude God from public discourse," the Pope said, "we should welcome the 'true conquests of the Enlightenment' -- especially the stress on human rights and the freedom of religion and its practice."

"By stressing the universal character of human rights, grounded in the dignity of the human person created in God's image, you carry out an important task of evangelization," the Pontiff said, "since this teaching forms an essential aspect of the Gospel."

"In so doing," he added, "you are following in the footsteps of St. Paul, who knew how to express the essentials of Christian faith and practice in a way that could be assimilated by the Gentile communities to which he was sent."

Dialogue
Benedict XVI also encouraged the Southeast Asian bishops to continue their "commitment to interreligious dialogue."

"I encourage you to carry forward this important work," the Pope said, "exploring every avenue open to you. I realize that not all the territories you represent offer the same degree of religious liberty, and many of you, for example, encounter serious difficulties in promoting Christian religious instruction in schools.

"Do not become disheartened, but continue to proclaim with conviction the 'unsearchable riches of Christ,' so that all may come to hear of the love of God made manifest in Jesus."

The Holy Father said that through dialogue with other religious in which the Gospel is clearly articulated, the Church helps others "to recognize and observe the law 'written on their hearts.'"

"In this way," he added, "your teaching can reach a wide audience and help to promote a unified vision of the common good. This in turn should help to foster growth in religious freedom and greater social cohesion between members of different ethnic groups, which can only be conducive to the peace and well-being of the entire community."

[ Taken from Zenit ]

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The Christian life is neither purely by grace alone nor works alone. It is a tension, a dynamic of both being intertwined and perhaps not entirely separate from each other as people often make it out to be.

Surely, it is by grace that we are saved and not of our own works or capabilities. Had it not been for a God Who condescended by making Himself "slightly lower than the angels" so He could reach us, we would not have been able to reach Him on our own accord. No amount of revelation from on high would have been able to open our eyes, save for God coming to be one of us so that we could see Him and hear Him and touch Him.

But now that the means is given us to reach God because God has reached us, by grace, our faith needs to be worked out in order that we can arrive at the intended destination of becoming truly human the way God has intended for us to be. The graces that we so often receive through the sacraments are to be appropriated by the regenerated human will given through the Holy Spirit at our baptism and confirmation.

The lives of a countless many are hardly transformed even though they so frequently encounter Jesus the Word in the liturgy of the Church. Here is the reason: the grace received is not appropriated by the human will.

Just as works without faith is a vain form of behaviourism, faith without works is dead. Who said we had to choose either one?

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I heard someone sharing this message to a group of newly baptised and confirmed Christians (neophytes) tonight:

Be the sandals of Jesus.

That's all for now. This is reflection enough to keep me awake throughout the night.

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The Church is not wagging an accusing finger at its children. It is wounded with concern and fear for its children, even when its warnings are not heeded or misunderstood.

The Church can seem so hard to those who don't know her heart. They see the exterior which must be hard and firm (truthful) for all our sakes in order to protect the heart.

Joseph Quinn in "The Church's Food"

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Just a very brief reflection before I shut down for the day. I'm in the midst of teaching a course at a local parish. It's a course on the differences between the major Christian traditions. The course is well-attended with some 50 participants. I think we're having fun so far.

This evening, we had a brief moment of mid-course assessment and evaluation forms were handed out to the participants. When I returned home, I looked through the responses in the evaluation forms and came across something which I'm unlikely to forget anytime soon:

Question: Briefly share one major lesson you have learned from this course so far.

Response: How little I know.

To call this apophatic theology would be an understatement. It sounded to me like the cry of a heart that truly thirsts after the splendour of God's truth.

Lord, please make me humble like that. How little I know.

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Today we recall the Emaus experience, together with the lostness, despair, and helplessness which accompanied the friends of Jesus as they were walking away from Jerusalem in utter disappointment.

But then came a strangely unfamiliar face who performed a familiar action. Through the breaking of bread, they recognised who this person was as he held himself in his hands, as he lifted up the offering of the bread and wine:

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?"

I wonder if we ever still recognise Jesus in the normalcy and monotony of life - even in disappointment and despair - anymore. I wonder if the experience of burning hearts at Christ's revelation of himself in the breaking of bread still holds true.

Lord, I'm not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

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So it's now post-Easter. We celebrate the triumph of the resurrected Christ, because the passion and the pain are over, right?

WRONG.

Who says the resurrected Christ never got persecuted again after that? He did, again and again. His friends still failed him. People who claimed to love him still abandoned him. And it's still happening.

It is probably untrue that most people in this world - most Christians, even - have strong convictions about their values and beliefs. It is also probably untrue that they have strong convictions about issues of faith and friendship. They just don’t feel so strongly about such things.

So when someone like that fails to stand up for faith or friendship, perhaps the only excuse attributable to that failure to protect the faith or friendship is “He’s just like that. He doesn’t feel strongly about things.” After all, some people just aren’t the sort who’d act on a conviction, or even have a conviction.

But might it not be also true that these very people who’re “just like that” are also the ones who’d quickly dismiss Christ’s demands towards those who claim to be His friends? Inasmuch as I try to imagine Jesus saying, “Don’t mind him, he’s just like that. He doesn’t have very much of a conviction”, I can’t. Because He seems very clear that friendship with Him involves very high stakes, and that one must be willing to suffer - even die - for that friendship. How would one be willing to work out such a friendship without feeling strongly about it?

The Early Church had a name for people like that - “traditors”. These were people who gave up the sacred writings of the Church to be burned by the anti-Christian authorities. They were Christians, and they loved Jesus, but probably never felt very strongly about the wrongs and the rights of life (as long as these wrongs or rights didn’t affect them personally).

Traditors are the ones who’d say “You’ve got to understand the situation. It was really tough. It wouldn’t have been wise to have gone against those authorities. After all, these are just sacred writings of the Church; there’s more where that came from. So why should I lose my life over such a thing?”

Traditors are number one excuse-mongers. They excuse and quickly absolve themselves for compromising faith and friendship. But for them, it doesn’t matter, because they just don’t feel strongly about these things. So long as they don’t have to suffer.

Happy post-Easter.

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With Christ...

Raised to life...

Received home...

Where I should have been years ago.

Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

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It is a dark day. It is a day when some Christian communities have their altars stripped bare. Some others cover the altars with dark cloth. (Of course, some other Christian communities simply do nothing and just enjoy a good day off, but that's besides the point.)

There's nothing very good about Good Friday, if we come to think about it. It's a day of darkness, mourning, and grief... and extreme guilt. Liturgies that are well-done properly place us in the position of those who betrayed Jesus, abandoned Him, and even demanded his assassination. It stings. It hurts.

But also, as I commemorate this day, one sentence that shines through this darkness and which keeps reverberating in my heart throughout the day is this:

SEE, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW.

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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.

The Passion of Jesus was really the culmination of a season of crisis. It wasn’t merely a trivial crisis that he went through. It was a life crisis that put him and his friends to the test. Two of the main things that were tested throughout this crisis were friendship and loyalty.

Crisis truly has a way of testing us and bringing to light the deepest motivations of our hearts. The deepest forms of selfishness emerge in the face of a crisis. The strongest anger lashes out in the face of a crisis. The most lethal vengeance is executed in the face of a crisis. Crisis mercilessly leaves us with no way to hide the secrets of our hearts. If on a normal day we are able to camouflage ourselves with props which exhibit deep devotion towards God, loyalty towards friends, and selflessness towards humanity, the true state of our hearts comes to light when crisis hits.

And so it was with those people who called themselves friends of Jesus.

When crisis befell them, very quickly, betrayal and abandonment took over. They started scattering themselves away from him and denying that they ever knew him. Understandably, they needed to survive in a world where reputation and security mattered. And perhaps, if this Messiah wasn’t strong enough to come up against the diabolical powers ruling the land, if he was going to suffer a disgraceful fate, then they would be justified for moving on with life and acknowledging that they had placed their bets on the wrong horse.

So, yes… after the deeply moving episode of the washing of feet, the vows to remain faithful to him even unto death, and the partaking of his body and his blood, they conveniently failed him and themselves when a crisis hit soon after. So much for all the claims to friendship and undivided loyalty.

Holy Week is a week of crisis. It challenges us to confront ourselves with the deepest motivations of our hearts. If all throughout the year, we’ve been professing religious claims of loyalty, piety, service and sacrifice, Holy Week confronts us with what we are actually capable of doing to God, to one another, and to ourselves when a crisis hits.

May we not be too quick to submerge ourselves into the resurrection joy of Easter. Before any of us actually thinks we’re already Christian enough in God’s eyes, let the reality of the Holy Week confront us and linger a little longer - so that we may see the true state of our hearts.

And if there, we see and acknowledge the capacity for bitterness, for abandonment, for betrayal, and for self-motivation that lies within us, this may just be a definitive moment of conversion for some of us.

To friendship...

Posted by SK at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For some, the the study of the Church Fathers is simply a dispassionate field of study which they call the Patristics. It's a science, a method upon which much historical criticism must be applied. It's a fascinating field of study, but nothing more. Even if something was to be got from the study of the Church Fathers, it is to be done with utmost selectivity.

For some others, the Church Fathers are not even worth paying attention to. In fact, the Christian era prior to the sixteenth century constituted religious corruption at its apex. Nothing is worth remembering about it. Everything prior to the sixteenth century constituted abominable corruption, abhorring abuse, crusading zealousness and everything else other than true Christianity. The age of the Church Fathers was just not as enlightened as it should have been... until the sixteenth century came.

This is where I beg to differ and have chosen an entirely different direction. I believe that no Christian can study theology with adequate honesty whilst choosing to study Scriptures and yet disregarding the Church Fathers as people who were the earliest passers down of paradosis (tradition). It is unfortunate that they should have been regarded as those who were merely trying to figure out what the Christian faith was all about and were gravely mistaken about much of the faith (unlike us, who know better).

I believe we are the ones who are lost in our search upon conceding to the folly of truncating Christian theology into something that begins in purity only from the sixteenth century. In thinking that searching the Scriptures for ourselves would help us derive infallible interpretations for our readings, we have discarded the readings of the Fathers of the Church who lived learning to interpret Scriptures the way Jesus had taught the Apostles.

No theologian who has studied the Church Fathers with utter seriousness can disregard that the Christian way of life for many today is much, much less than what it should be. People have come to assimilate into their life systems the bits and pieces of the Christian way of life that fascinate them, whilst disregarding the others. And their interpretations of the Scriptures do not rebuke or correct them anymore because the Church Fathers have been silenced; so hermeneutics in all shapes, sizes, and theological inclinations is free for the taking.

Without paying due regard to the Church Fathers, there cannot be a concrete embodiment of tradition. And without a concrete embodiment of tradition, they cannot point to anything except some concepts and texts whose interpretation is anybody's guess. But they'd just go ahead and think that their right to private interpretation is infallible anyway.

A faith claiming to have infallible Scriptures but not possessing infallible interpretations for those infallible Scriptures: that's the faith by which many live today. To each his own.

Posted by SK at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Church puts both palms and thorns together this Sunday, in commemoration of both Christ's triumphal entry on a donkey into Jerusalem and the suffering He had to endure a week later. It is both a Sunday of the Palm and a Sunday of the Passion.

It is one of those occasions in the Church when life makes less sense than it should. Many years ago, in the old liturgy of the Church, the Gospel reading on the Passion Sunday was greeted with profound silence. There would be no homily following the reading. In fact, even the acclamation after the reading ("The Gospel of the Lord") was omitted.

Because it is difficult to justify how life comes through death, deliverance through suffering, triumph through tragedy. Perhaps this paradox is best proclaimed through imagery than through eloquent speech.

So let us just place the palms and the thorns together, and in silence, contemplate the paschal mystery into which we are called.

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Jesus betrayed his disciples.

We often spend much of our time reflecting on how his disciples betrayed and abandoned him, and how someone like Peter made lofty promises which he failed to keep. But the truth is, just as they had betrayed Jesus, perhaps they too felt that Jesus had betrayed them.

If we really think about it, perhaps he really did. He betrayed them by failing to have met the expectations they had of him. They were simple people who had trusted him with their lives. They had entrusted their futures into his hands. And for all that they had given up just to be his companions in the final part of his earthly journey, they had a right to have expected better things from him.

But he failed to deliver. He had to get crucified, suffer humiliation unto death, and consequently abandoned those who had been faithful to him.

Don't be too quick to judge the disciples. Imagine how painfully lost they must have felt throughout that brief season following Jesus' death and burial. Try to internalise how abandoned and cheated - how foolish - they must have felt.

Part of the paschal mystery is that for as long as we are called to live in community and have expectations on relationships we build in community, we are bound to fail and betray one another. So yes, just as his disciples had betrayed him, Jesus had betrayed them too.

This thought must be disturbing for some of us who have a perfect image of Jesus. I know. It disturbs me too. But it also challenges me to think through again how I have spent much of my life trying to avoid betrayals. Maybe it's just a necessary part of the paschal mystery that needs to be realised in community.

Perhaps the paschal mystery is such that only in betrayal and abandonment can we find the resurrected Christ awaiting in the light of the dawn.

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Major shifts will be taking place in my life in the weeks and months to come.

It's not that life hasn't already been utterly dynamic for me or that there haven't been any sort of drastic changes taking place before. It's just that this time I'm not talking normal major. I'm talking major major.

In the face of changes, what should one do? Change presents the impending danger of being sucked into the torrent of dynamism and being overwhelmed by the possibilities it presents.

To avoid that, sustained and extended contemplation is required.

I'll be spending the next few days within the confines of a monastery, away from the familiar kind of civilisation that can be quite abusive to the soul. For contemplation, absolute silence, and solitude.

Since I will be living the eremetic life for a while, all lines will be down. I cannot be contacted.

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There are times when the Master bids us to go in a certain direction and we know not why. But we go, because obedience is born not of understanding but of love.

We obey God not simply because we understand him, for to claim to love him out of understanding insults who he is. We must obey him despite the shallowness of our understanding. For obedience is reflected in its fullness when one obeys in love rather than through understanding.

Obedience towards God is rendered even more difficult when God demands such obedience through an icon, a human figure. The human icon provokes our inclination to respond towards the call of obedience by saying “Tell me why first”, “I need to understand first before I obey you”, or “I need to trust you first”.

The same rule applies with both God and the icons he sends into our lives to provide direction for us.

The rule of obedience has nothing to do with understanding. It is the rule of love. For Jesus said, “If you love me, you will do what I say”, not “If you understand me, you will do what I say”.

Posted by SK at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the many things that are difficult to understand about contemporary Christianity is how people desire to believe in Jesus, and even find his “rebellious” counter-cultural ways appealing, but have absolutely no desire to be the way he was.

In many ways, they try to communicate his revolutionary life in the third person, but never in the first person. It’s always Jesus who was the provocative one, the challenging one, the unsettling one. And ironically, all these messages about him are communicated in the most stable and secure environments - in seminaries, from pulpits, and in bible studies. Hardly in action or lifestyle.

The greatest of security-seeking Christians seem to be the ones talking about the counter-cultural and revolutionary Jesus. Those who occupy the highest chairs of structural positions are the ones talking about sacrificing one’s own reputation and position for the sake of justice and peace.

When confronted with the practical alternative of actually being provocative and revolutionary in lifestyle and choice, you hear a thousand and one excuses and reasons for why it’s impractical to do so:

“Jesus and his early believers suffered persecution because it was necessary for them. For us today, it’s not necessary.”

“The bible cannot be taken wholesale just like that. We must use our wisdom to discern what applies to today’s situations and what don’t apply any longer. We must be as innocent as doves and wise like serpents!”

“I’m already suffering for my faith! You see how much time I spend serving God in church? Who else devotes so much time like that?”

“Come on, by doing all these things, you’re just courting trouble unnecessarily. I have enough trouble in my life already. I’ve had enough, and don’t want anymore unnecessary trouble.”

Really, perhaps many of the things Jesus did was unnecessary after all. He was perhaps courting trouble in vain. From this rhyme of reasoning, maybe it was his own fault that he eventually went to the cross. Had he learned to behave himself properly, he might not have had to be crucified. But no, he had to go ahead and do the unnecessary things.

For we who are wise, stay clear. Stay out of trouble. Always speak of Jesus in the third person. Forget about embodying his gospel in the first person. Be wise. After all, all you need to get into heaven is to believe in Jesus’ saving power, and you’re saved.

Posted by SK at 1:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I knew his voice and his song first before I knew the man. When I first heard his song, something in the tone of the voice cut deep into my spirit. You could say it was a rather mystical experience.

But I never knew why there was a "soul" in his voice unlike other voices I'd heard before. Until I saw him on video.

His name is Tony Melendez. He's more complete than most people I've met.

Posted by SK at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

...I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.

Henri Nouwen

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Of course it's the Chinese New Year. But it's also the beginning of the Lenten season! It is a season of reflection, withdrawal, penitence, and of receiving the forgiveness of God. It is a call for us to return to the presence of God in response to his invitation of love.

So after all the New Year celebrations and the red packets and the Chinese festivities, today I've returned to the Lenten mode. This morning, I accompanied a minister to bring the Sacraments and the Word to a group of foreign people in a very interior area.

We walked in the blazing heat through this...

and this.

It was a two-kilometre walk, going through high and low, jungle and quarry, before we arrived and spent some two hours with these people:

It's the Chinese New Year, but don't forget, it's Lent. It's a good time to be honest with ourselves about our failings, and also a good time to come to terms with the love of God which conquers all human failings... if we care to receive it and to be embraced by this love.

Posted by SK at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

- Jesus, the Christ -

I was reminded through a homily this morning that the opposites of the peacemakers are not the peace-destroyers or the people who wage war against others. The anti-theses of the peacemakers are the peacekeepers.

What might the difference be between peacemakers and peacekeepers?

Peacemakers are those who acknowledge the necessity of conflict. But together with that, they seek to work things out amidst conflict in order that constructive solutions may be found. They understand that the world is not a perfect place and is fraught with conflict, and that sometimes (if not often) conflict can be a constructive instrument in order to bring positive change to the world and to society. Their sense of peace isn’t a myopic one; it’s a long-sighted peace. They desire to become instruments for ushering in a perpetual era of peace in the human order. The peace they are making isn’t to be found in the present.

Peacekeepers are those who want to avoid trouble at all costs because it brings too much inconvenience to them. They want to avoid rocking the boat and are fixated on maintaining the status quo. They are game for being “revolutionary” only to the extent that it doesn’t cause them trouble. When they sniff trouble from a mile away, they stop trying. The preoccupation of peacekeepers is staying out of trouble. Their desire for peace is self-motivated; they want peace for themselves. They don’t desire peace in the world order as much as they desire peace for themselves. Peacekeepers are selfish.

But peacekeepers have a way of defending themselves: "Such trouble isn't really necessary. Why invite such unnecessary trouble when it can be avoided?" Ironically, the more you observe them, the more you'll realise that peacekeepers almost never ever "invite trouble". Because when trouble is what a person wants to avoid, then no amount of trouble is ever necessary.

Churches comprise of too many peacekeepers and too few peacemakers. Peacekeepers often rise up to become very high-ranking leaders of Christian communities. They are well-loved because they don’t provoke people’s disfavour. They’re crafty communicators and skilful bureaucrats.

As for the peacemakers, Jesus called them “sons of God”. But he wasn’t about to let such ideals remain unscathed by realities of life. Immediately after calling the peacemakers “sons of God”, he talked about those who would be persecuted because of their desire to defend righteousness at all cost. The kingdom of heaven would be theirs - but at a price, obviously. He who came to preach peace himself said, “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”. Peacemakers are constantly having to reckon with this paradox of life.

It would seem from the Gospels that Jesus spent much of his effort throughout his public ministry exposing the motivations of the peacekeepers, segregating them from the peacemakers. He saw through the heart. He was such a strange rhetorist. Powerful but strange.

Posted by SK at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm reminded today to not stop dreaming, regardless of what might have happened in life. Through disappointment, pain, loss and betrayal, the follower of Jesus is called to keep on dreaming.

Not small dreams about the self, but big dreams about others; about the world. Not to fall naively for the dreams sold by self-motivated dream merchants who may sometimes disguise themselves as religious leaders. Not to buy into the offers of dream merchants who sell dreams that appeal to our own carnal desires for existential significance...

...but to dream the dream of God.

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A thought that occurred in my mind over a conversation with a couple of friends about the spiritual life:

What breaks your heart reflects what captures it.

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Crossing over - into anything - is a hard decision to make. As you walk into a new life, a new sphere, a new unknown, you leave behind the wealth of the past together with all the familiarity and the control you have over it.

The question is, will you do it?

Even if you knew for a fact that crossing over would leave you in a state of utter nothingness, would you do it? If there was nothing to be got from crossing over, and all you could take along with you into the new unknown was a conscience and a conviction, would you do it?

To leave behind the beauty of recognition, fame, admiration - or maybe just acceptance - in search of a newly discovered something that may leave you with nothing except that something on which to cling - would you do it?

Walking into the dark with no sight of the future, embracing everything that is unknown and alien to you… does that not sound like the paschal mystery spoken of in your faith? So much for talking about it; now is the challenge to live it out.

But if you're afraid of trouble, don't do it!

Some people prefer to just linger by the wayside, waiting for you to give accounts of your adventures through the darkness. They enjoy listening to those stories - even being challenged by those stories - but would never walk a mile with you through those adventures. No siree... the stories alone are enough to keep their adrenalines pumping.

Really, you have got to be foolish enough to cross over. You have to choose to either be wise enough to withhold such a foolish decision, or to be foolish enough to follow the voice of the wise Spirit and cross over.

You’re invited all the same. It’s just a matter of whether you’re foolish enough to follow.

Coming?

Posted by SK at 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

1. Longing for light, we wait in darkness.
Longing for truth, we turn to you.
Make us your own, your holy people,
light for the world to see.

Refrain:
Christ, be our light! Shine in our hearts.
Shine through the darkness.
Christ, be our light!
Shine in your church gathered today.

2. Longing for peace, our world is troubled.
Longing for hope, many despair.
Your word alone has power to save us.
Make us your living voice.

3. Longing for food, many are hungry.
Longing for water, many still thirst.
Make us your bread, broken for others,
shared until all are fed.

4. Longing for shelter, many are homeless.
Longing for warmth, many are cold.
Make us your building, sheltering others,
walls made of living stone.

5. Many the gifts, many the people,
many the hearts that yearn to belong.
Let us be servants to one another,
making your kingdom come.

Posted by SK at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

The above are the words of Jesus. What a contradiction from the image of Jesus as the Prince of Peace. The very Lord who claims to be the restorer of all good things into perfect order here speaks of himself as being the source of division even in the most basic unit of society - biological families.

Surely, he does long for peace in the world; just not at the expense of truth. Surely, he desires for the restoration of order in the world; just not at the expense of his Kingship, and for some, his call in their lives to place him in a position of utmost importance such that they have to leave their families to obey his call.

Jesus is merely confronting us with the reality that obeying him creates disharmony even in the family. The intention to truly obey God's calling in totality can (and most often will) lead to misunderstanding, non-acceptance, and ultimately hostility.

This experience wasn't alien to the saints of the past. A young man had a bitter argument with his father and left his family naked. The local bishop had to bring him clothes. The young man was St Francis of Assisi.

And to think we expect things to turn out differently in our generation. How we always manage to fool ourselves. Excuses, excuses.

Posted by SK at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have just been reminded by someone that suffering is a form of spirituality in which one identifies with the sufferings of Jesus. I take this teaching as it is, no questions asked. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that there's more reflection to be done on suffering.

I think there's one thing that might be even more challenging than suffering itself, and that is, journeying with the suffering. In a sense, a sufferer has no choice but to suffer. But a person journeying with a sufferer has to will himself into self-denial in order to journey with the suffering and to partake in that suffering together; to choose to suffer even when he doesn't have to.

When accompanying people who are suffering, our desire to be fellow sufferers wares off over time. Journeying with people who suffer is a very tiresome experience, especially when we cannot really understand how their predicament feels.

When journeying with sufferers, we are most often confronted with our own inability to empathise for extended seasons of time. We can empathise only for as long as our own patience permits. It’s not difficult to “help” a sufferer for a limited duration; it really doesn’t take very much out of us. The test comes when we have to share life with a sufferer.

The durability of our patience is a rather apt indication of the extent of our love for another person over our love for ourselves.

When the journey of accompaniment gets too wearisome, we turn away from the sufferer to ourselves and we throw in the towel. Instead of asking, “What about the sufferer?”, we begin asking, “What about me?”

Suffering is something spiritual. But to choose to suffer with the suffering is deep spirituality. It's for those who truly love.

Posted by SK at 2:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tonight, the voice of God speaks to my heart, asking:

"Did you really think that your pursuit of truth would've cost you nothing?"

"I am the Truth, and it has cost me everything to establish that in your midst.
What did you think it was going to cost you - nothing?"

Posted by SK at 3:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I forget, we do not live in a world of justice. Justice belongs to another kingdom, an unseen kingdom. In our pursuit of justice in this kingdom, we sometimes get crushed by the greater power of injustice.

Injustice is often bred by those in power, those who preach righteousness and mercy and love. But power and these virtues don't sit very well with each other. So in the final analysis, when they're made to choose between power and these virtues, the self gets in the way. Power wins.

At times like these, it is a challenge to remember the words of friends like these:

Justice often fails in our world and even in the church, but our God is just. Let us plod on; you have friends and loved ones who are journeying with you.

And it is a challenge to keep believing in righteousness and justice, mercy and love. Even if these virtues remain unseen for now.

Lord, I want to belief. Help my unbelief.

Posted by SK at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Text: Iona Community
Music: Trad. Scottish folk tune, KelvineGrove

Will you come and follow me
If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know
and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown
Will you let my name be known
Will you let my life be grown in you
and you in me ?

Will you leave yourself behind
If I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
And never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare
Should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you
and you in me?

Will you let the blinded see
If I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoner free
And never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean,
and do such as this unseen,
And admit to what I mean in you
And you in me?

Will you love the “you” you hide
If I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside
And never be the same?
Will you use the faith you’ve found
To reshape the world around,
Through my sight and touch and sound in you
And you in me?

Christ, your summons echoes true
When you but call my name
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go
Where your love and footsteps show,
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you
And you in me.

Posted by SK at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The priest, as he was entering the church sanctuary, was greeted by a little boy. He asked the priest, “Father, what do you do?”

The priest was rather dumbfounded at that question and so he fumbled, “Err… I… err…”

The boy asked, “Are you married?”, to which the Reverend Father replied, “No”.

“So you have no children?” The priest said, “No, of course not!”

“Are you a lawyer?” The priest quickly replied, “Well I used to be. But not anymore, since I’m now a priest”.

“So then what do you do?” The priest remained silent. It was just a very difficult question to answer.

The boy then abruptly concluded, “So you’re not married, you have no children, and you’re not a lawyer anymore. So you’re a nobody?”

It suddenly, dawned on the priest that he was a nobody. He walked silently into his chambers after Mass and wrote in his journal:

I am a nobody. I’m an icon of Christ, the God who became a nobody. I’m of no relevance to the world and will always appear to contribute nothing to the scheme of the world. Because that’s what I’m called to be; a nobody. So that when others see me, they see Christ.

Posted by SK at 2:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

- Sr Elizabeth Segleau, SDS -

Religious life is not for wimps,
It is for those filled with courage.
Religious life is not for the lazy,
It is for those who have the fire within.

Religious life is not for those who thirst for wealth,
It is for those whose treasure is set and kept in God.
Religious life is not for those who are their own boss,
It is for those who are obedient in seeking God’s will.

Religious life is not for those who expect to be directed,
It is for those who trust and listen to the Holy Spirit.
Religious life is not for the loners,
It is for those who hope to grow in the company of others.

Religious life is not for those who have a single plan,
It is for those who are ready to help with many plans.
Religious life is not for the grumpy,
It is for those who already rejoice in God’s friendship.

Religious life is not for those who always need to be busy,
It is for those who can remain in the quiet and stay a while with God.
Religious life is not for the militant,
It is for those who are able to be flexible.

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The Son of God once said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. This bespeaks spiritual hunger. It refers to those who realise the poverty of their spirits and the starvation of their souls, and who actively acknowledge it and ardently seek to be made full. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Spiritual hunger does not seem to be very common these days. Our lives are too cluttered; we do not give ourselves the space to be spiritually hungry. We quickly fill the nothingness of our lives with internet chats and forums, movies, music, sports, and frantic socialisation.

The more religiously inclined ones seek spiritual entertainment by fraternising with the pop-Jesus. They look for churches that provide them with this particular “effect” they seek in their very seemingly Christian but very unspiritual journey.

These things do not satisfy spiritual hunger; they prevent one from experiencing real spiritual hunger. They acutely dull the human senses towards the longing, the searching, and the reaching out for the divine.

Those who are truly spiritually hungry often find themselves lonely in a world that has forgotten the virtue of spiritual hunger. Most others are just really quite okay with the way things are, and this often (but not always) includes religious leaders. So the ones who are truly spiritually hungry and who pursue truth find themselves outcasted even from religious communities.

How can spiritual hunger be cultivated in a world that promises so much gratification to the desires of the restless soul, and ironically, perpetuates that state of restlessness? Religion, we can find - just walk into any church. But what about true spirituality that really feeds the poor in spirit, brings the Kingdom of God to them and then draws them into it?

Posted by SK at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May God bless you with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger,
at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

My God bless you with tears,
to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness,
to believe that you can make a difference in this world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Amen.

Posted by SK at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s Christmas Eve. And it feels strange writing, on Christmas Eve, an article due for publication on Holy Week. But that’s precisely what I’ve been doing all day.

This exercise really does give a twist to the meaning of Christmas for me. It takes the commercial glimmer away from Christmas and dissipates the sparkle from the eyes of baby Jesus when I have to be contemplating on how he would one day have to have the weight of his body supported by three nails pinned onto a cross.

On Christmas, we speak of the arrival of hope. But the coming of this hope was embellished with a host of unrealistic expectations about how God would save his people at his coming. When Christmas is commemorated through the lenses of an excruciating crucifixion, suddenly there’s a pain that comes with it.

Christmas is the arrival of hope. But by the time of the realisation of hope at Easter, one realises that the journey towards hope must pass through a Good Friday.

A Blessed Christmas to you, as we together remember that hope is one that brings together with it pain.

Posted by SK at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are times in our lives when we are shaken by evil or painful realities that confront us. Those of us who're not living in shielded environments and who expose ourselves to the "real" things of the world soon find that assumptions of security and stability in life are but false notions.

When misfortunes befall us (whether or not it's through our own fault), the fact of human vulnerability abruptly stares us in the face of our souls. We then no longer find that life consists of sugar and spice and everything nice. When misfortunes befall other people, we may perhaps feel a sense of sympathy; but still, they remain far off from us. But when misfortunes confront us, we feel robbed, we feel violated, we feel oppressed.

It's good for the soul. It's good that we're constantly reminded of the fragility of life. It's right that we should place our hopes on things that last and things that aren't vulnerable to human violation. Being confronted by the reality of vulnerability in the present scheme of things does serve to bring our consciousness back to the way our lives should be.

As human persons, we constantly strive for an equilibrium in our existence. The problem is, we seek to create this equilibrium externally, and external equilibriums are volatile since they can be tampered with by forces other than ourselves. Life is about finding a place of equilibrium within, not without. Then we will be able to say, "Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, 'Even so, it is well with my soul.'"

Posted by SK at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Some things remain universal beyond the boundaries of chronology.

As it is with the modern day, it does seem like many (if not most) people of Jesus' day were comfortably happy with the mode of religion constructed for them by the religious authorities. Perhaps the religious programmes that were institutionally constructed helped them to feel a sense of security. "Do this and this and that, and participate in this ritual and that ritual, and you're all right."

In as much as we would like to think that people are beginning to seek reasons for their faith and to question the meaning of their existence (and hence, together with the significance of familiar religious symbols), this is perhaps not characteristic of the vast majority of the masses. Perhaps most religious people are simply secure in their unquestioning state, preferring to stay with prevalent religious conventions.

This presents the dilemma of preaching a revolutionary Christ, who by his very nature of being God, questioned the religious order of his day. He was the oddly strange person who seemed to be dissatisfied with what conventional religion had to offer to the human dilemma. And yet, how could anyone know if his revolutionary ideas were truly those that God desired? It was an insane risk to follow him. Some did anyway.

To those who were desperate for some fresh answers to their lives' concerns, Christ's message seemed inspirational and refreshing. To those who were "all right" because the religious institution said so (since they were abiding by all the prescribed religious requirements), Christ probably seemed to be a psychologically displaced oddball.

Perhaps those who did listen to his message were simply the misfits who had nothing left to lose in life. When there is much to lose, much of the revolutionary message of the Gospel has to be sifted through the lenses of our vested interests; the message of Christ needs to be "neutralised" so it becomes less distasteful.

After centuries of "preaching the Gospel to all the world", the dilemma of preaching the authentic Gospel abides. And I wonder just how much "evangelicalism" (if this term even means anything anymore) is contributing to this dilemma.

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When Ignatius of Loyola and his companions decided that they would dedicate their lives to an unrelenting commitment to “the greater glory of God”, they knew exactly what that commitment would entail: falling into the disfavour of all sorts of establishments, i.e. the church, governments, and families.

The rest was history. In countless national contexts, the religious of the Society of Jesus have been the catalysts for major societal revolutions as they staked their lives and reputations for justice and peace. These revolutions often caused them to have been regarded with disfavour and suspicion by secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

The point is this: when a man is so dedicated to the greater glory of God, no establishment - not even the church - can contain the magnitude of his vision. A man who is sold out to the greater glory of God becomes a threat to governments, to the church establishment, and even to his own family. A commitment to the greater glory of God compromises the political stability and the self-serving motives of such establishments.

Can one truly serve the greater glory of God without provoking the disfavour of earthly establishments? Ask Jesus. Ask history. Try as we may to shield ourselves against the wounding accuracy of this reality, it remains true that being subservient to the greater glory of God makes one an enemy to the illusions of these establishments.

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."

I wouldn’t kid myself.

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Waiting is a tedious discipline.

I stand at a place of waiting. I await many things; things I expect to happen, answers I expect to get, things I expect to receive, and also things I expect to give, all at the appointed times. Some of the appointed moments are imminent, others remain uncertain.

What does one do whilst sitting in the waiting room? How does one wait? Does one sit and really just do nothing?

The problem with waiting lies precisely in the nothingness of that act itself. It feels like nothing is happening, like nobody cares to make something happen either. Waiting sometimes inflicts a sense of abandonment on the one who waits.

The discipline of waiting tests the depth of peace present in one’s soul. To survive moments of waiting, one needs to focus on the duties of the present moment, inconsequential though those menial duties may seem in comparison to the significance of that which one is waiting for.

Also, one needs to sustain the awareness of God’s abiding presence during such moments of waiting; to know that even though God has not yet moved, he is there, remaining with you. With me.

So, wait.

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Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to Him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us?

No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation...

And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return.

Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI
St. Peter's Square
Sunday, 24 April 2005

Posted by SK at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A portion of a letter from a Jesuit Priest, a friend:

...As for your experience of the DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, allow me to share insights from Ignatius of Loyola.

He talks about the life-giving Spirit (Good Spirits) and the death-dealing Spirit (Evil Spirits). The dark night in your case is not from God in the sense of being drawn into the darkness of the all-too-bright-blinding holiness of God, but occasioned by the evil wickedness of the human heart and the system.

So this dark night turns you in on yourself (very self-centered) and weighs you down with thoughts (depressing ones - what a scoundrel scandal you are!!) and thus effects your emotions (leading to despair and alienation from God).

In such moments, turn your thoughts towards God (away from self), stay in the bosom of God (God loves me, God forgives me, God enfolds me with unconditional love) and stay afloat in the sea of God's rays of love.

...Know that we all love you as God's special gift!! Believe this as Gospel truth so that no darkness can completely overshadow this truth with its darkness and thus render the death-dealing spirit "toothless".

Posted by SK at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The future is uncertain, that’s a given. How wonderful it would be, we think, if there was a crystal ball into which we could gaze just so we could have a glimpse of the future.

The truth is, there is no future to be sighted within the crystal ball, for the future is a non-existent entity. The future becomes existent only when it becomes the present. When the story of life unfolds in all its glory, turning each possibility into a realised present, then the future becomes existent, rendering it a present.

Sometimes, in our need for certainty, we make the future existent, even determined. The case for determined futures often even turns to religious language for support. However, this manner of determinism (not determination) ignores the crucial place of human responsibility in the unfolding of the future into the present.

Choice is what humankind has been given. Sometimes it is a gift, at other times it is a curse. When the future unfolds as the present, it is often a result of choices we and others have made. Surely, there are exceptional instances, but seldom so. And then, when the future has unfolded as the present, how we choose to respond is again another call for the exercise of the human prerogative to choose.

As of now, there is no future to be known. It doesn’t exist. The future is a concept, not a reality. Now, how one responds to such uncertainty, that’s a choice. Make no mistake about it: how we choose to respond to the present uncertainty will affect the future, and we will know it when the future becomes the present.

Posted by SK at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Trust used to be a much easier thing.

Trust used to be about me; that when I trusted someone, it reflected my own virtue. Trust used to be something I would have invested in someone - anyone - unless the person overtly indicated that he did not want to be trusted. Even for one who betrayed that trust unintentionally, it would not have been entirely too difficult to choose to keep trusting him. Trust used to be a state of being, not a privilege you accorded to someone who was deemed worthy of it.

I’m afraid I might be losing the virtue of trust. When I can trust a person only because he has shown himself to be trustworthy, then my trust ceases to be a virtue. When I trust people only because they have earned it and demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that they will do me no harm, my trust no longer speaks of who I am as a person.

I badly want to - need to - struggle to uphold the old virtue of trust. It is difficult when your trust has been trodden upon and when you’ve spent almost a lifetime dodging political bullets and watching people pulling vindictive triggers. People you admired. People you trusted. Trust has become too vulnerable a virtue to embrace, even if it’s right.

To have to convert trust from a virtue into a tool for emotional survival is too unfortunate a thing for one to have to do. It must not happen. Thus, how a betrayed one moves on from here is a consideration of consequence.

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While there are those out there who are battling silently every day - with their lives - to make the world a better place, the rest of the affluent world is engaging in middle-class rhetorics.

Engaging in vigils, marches and “peaceful demonstrations” (whilst still maintaining the privilege of sustaining our careers and private commitments) is fine in as long as we do not forget that there are those whose livelihood and security are at stake every day because they are wholly devoted to that cause for which they live. These are silently empowering the poor, educating the ragged children in the streets, and tending to the dying. No amount of vigils, marches and “peaceful demonstrations” we engage in can ever match the cost they are paying for the choices they have made.

Each affluent human person is empowered to, and must, choose his direction in life. The curse of poverty is that one does not have the power to choose. But the curse of affluence is that the onus falls on the empowered one to choose his path in life, between that which is good and that which is better; to define with his God-given conscience what his life ideals will be.

Making the right decisions for our lives gets more and more difficult as we progress in our life journey. At a certain stage of life, by the time we decide to turn back and make the right decisions, we realise that we are a dozen decisions too late. There are now a lifestyle to sustain, commitments to stand by, social and organisational positions to protect, and reputations to maintain. And perhaps it would simply be easier to let our conscience be dulled and to keep rationalising ourselves out of these disturbing mental conversations.

The greatest self-deceit happens when we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are not deceiving ourselves.

Posted by SK at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a part of each of us that is a monk or a mystic, in that we yearn for perfect peace. But yet our lives are far removed from traditional monasteries. Most of us would not want to give up our personal and spiritual freedom to join the monastic life.

We seek wholeness but realise that wholeness is not possible without sacredness. Sacred life takes root in solutide, in the time we take to develop a relationship with our inner life - in the kind of setting a monastery would offer.

The modern Christian is called to speak to the monk or the mystic within himself. He needs to find his place in the sacred silence of solitude and inner reflection. He needs to live his everyday life as if the world were a holy monastery.

The monastic life, the sacred life, is no accidental incident. It is something we need to seek, to cultivate, to grow into. It is something that costs us something dear: it costs us ourselves.

Posted by SK at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing I love about river stones is this: they’re beautiful; very beautiful, to look at and to hold. These river stones possess a therapeutic property that makes people love to have them. It’s almost as if they have a healing component by the sheer virtue of their smoothness.

But river stones are difficult to form. It is relatively easier for a human person to sculpt a stone with sharp tools. But when nature creates its own sculpture out of a stone, time isn’t of as much essence, because nature is patient. Because the Creator of nature - the Originator of time - is patient. He isn’t in a rush to create His art.

Sculpting river stones is a task that cannot be rushed, because a river stone has to be bombarded extensively by wave after wave of running water over extended periods of time. The water never stops running and the intensity of its currents never dwindles. Only then can a river stone develop the smoothness it was meant to possess.

So let the river flow. The currents may be fierce, and sometimes unbearably so. But I’m a river stone, made to become increasingly smooth as the cruel currents mercilessly throw themselves over me and threaten to drown me out from the scheme of life. But let the river flow, and let me be drowned and forgotten.

One day, when I’m thoroughly smoothened, my therapeutic properties will emerge. Then, by the sheer nature of my being a river stone, I will be a source of healing to those who have been bruised by those who themselves are river stones and do not know it. And those who truly possess the capacity to appreciate nature’s art will know who my Sculptor is.

Posted by SK at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is sometimes rather bewildering when dealing with one’s own conscience. It’s easy to stand up and fight for justice when it pertains to the wellbeing of someone else. But when it comes to our own wellbeing, in the face of injustice, we’re obligated to deal with our conscience. This is because fighting for justice, when we’re the ones facing oppression and injustice, confronts us with the fine line between cruel vengeance and the truly noble duty of upholding justice.

Finding the delicate balance between these two similar acts (which have starkly contrasting motivations) is a challenge. But one cannot cop out just because the challenge is too big. It is one’s Christian duty to educate one’s neighbour to uphold justice above all political and bureaucratic concerns.

So here’s the thing: it’s time for action. And take action I will. But as I do so, I will constantly examine my motivations for so doing. In upholding justice and educating others to do the same, I must consistently reflect the virtue of grace; yet, it must be a grace which does not compromise the importance of justice.

My actions must reflect virtues that transcend all the furious anger lurking within me at having to face injustice and suffer false accusations. Each step of the journey towards the upholding of justice must be thoughtful, reflective, and gentle - but firm.

Upholding justice is an art. And I think I’m in the process of learning that art now. I’ve never had a problem speaking up for others, but all my life, I’ve had a problem speaking up for myself; as if others deserved justice but I didn’t. The journey towards justice must begin somewhere. So it’s time for action.

Posted by SK at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

“What Lord, after this phase of physical and intellectual growth and raging hormones? What? An intolerable stability in life? A calm of stagnation?

I’ve noticed that for most grown-ups, life is a mundane necessity. They thrive on 'little happinesses' that keep them going daily; 'little happinesses' that are tangible, to keep them sane and aware that their existence is somehow tolerable, somewhat.

Far be it from me! May my life be an adventure of ever-increasing growth into you. Start me on an adventure that will propel me into ever-increasing divinisation, that I may be one with you, in you, and through you. That I may be unceasingly Christified and be like you.

Whatever the cost, whatever the cause. Now.”

This was a prayer I whispered with such utter indignation some years ago. Foolishly so. And now, here I stand in the middle of an adventure, realising that adventures aren’t always what Enid Blyton made them to be.

In the midst of the wildness of this adventure, I doubt I can bring myself to say that prayer. I perhaps over-estimated my capacity to enjoy an adventure. The older me today realises that adventures can be excruciating, horrifying, suffocating, and unsettling; anything but thrilling.

But inasfar as these adventures have been divinising and Christifying, yes, certainly so.

Yet my prayer today, as one going through an adventure, is “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”

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Feeding sharks is risky business.

Nobody has ever told me that before. I've had to learn the lesson by experiencing the reality that this is an imperfect world in which sharks sometimes survive by biting off the hands that feed them.

I'm far from being an expert. I don't claim to be an expert in shark-feeding; and that is precisely why I've risked losing my hands to sharks more than once throughout my lifetime. In fact, I'm rather foolish, because I tend to risk the same thing over and over again; trying to be kind, foolishly kind.

When feeding, I suppose it's most important to first identify the animal you're feeding, and then to understand the best way to feed it. To satisfy its hunger... but without having to risk losing your hand. To not assume that just because you've fed a shark before, you can pat it on its head.

The foolish, like me, learn it the hard way. But such hard knocks are important, I suppose, for those who desire to live in integrity to the way of the shark-feeder who lost more than just his hand, but his entire life, to the sharks he fed.

That foolish man.

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Some seasons in life change unannounced.

Ideals crumble.

Dreams dissipate.

We were never promised otherwise anyway.

But life goes on. It must. To think of leaving it all and losing your life is an easy way out.

To live - that’s difficult. To once again fill your life with the sense of meaning you once lost, and to cherish that meaning - that’s difficult.

It takes a strong heart. An unrelenting spirit.

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These are dark days. Darkness covers the earth like an indelible layer of black mist, concealing all the secrets of the earth’s beauty. One cannot help but gaze at this situation with a regretful sense of despair and helplessness. To wish that there was a humungous vacuum cleaner that could suck out the mist of darkness to restore light and to bring hope is akin to cultivating a wishful make belief.

As much as it might seem like a hopeless dream, one must believe that brighter days lie ahead. Not just because embracing this dream helps us to get through today with an adequate measure of emotional survival, but also because this dream is a promise that is real. For it to bring true hope, it must be implicitly understood that this dream is real. A dream that carries only the prospects of wishful thinking constitutes nothing more than the fantasies of a foolish man whose feet aren’t planted on the ground.

But because we have a real dream which will be translated into reality at the appointed time, we must keep dreaming. It is this dream, together with the believing that the dream is true, that will propel us to keep waddling ourselves through the darkness of the mist that has covered the world, in the understanding that one day the light of promise will shine through.

When it's as dark as it can get, then you'll know that it can only get brighter.

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In your pursuit of justice, do not disgrace your God. It is just a very thin line that separates justice from vengeance.

Remember also that the world is full of different kinds of people. There are those angelic-like creatures who may have the darkest motives, and the pure-looking ones who may be the vilest offenders.

As for the less discerning, they just get deceived. For they have no ability to see through material realities.

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Change is the essence of time. And the present is the dividing line between your past and your future. In looking back, you see a story. In looking ahead, you witness possibilities.

You wonder if the future must look anything like the past, and if desired change is perhaps a possibility. The past carries with it a somewhat bitter innertia with an aftertaste that helplessly lingers. But the only way to move beyond the innertia of the past is to move forward even if each step constitutes but a heavy plod.

Naturally, your endeavour to venture into the future is rendered futile in the light of your helplessness. You feel yourself weak. That is only to be expected, for inasmuch as the past is no longer deemed desirable, the future carries with it an air of fear. Hence, you find yourself stumped in the state of the present, not desiring to move on (even if you are aware that the present provides a glimpse of future possibilities).

Know that your life is not yours to build. Neither does it belong to you. The One who authored it is the very same One who shall bring its ordained future to fulfillment. Perhaps what you need is not a spirit of strength or determination, but a spirit of obedient abandonment.

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There are those who think they are following the way of the Kingdom. And they take pride in just how Christian they are. And they have the evidence to show it. But when confronted with the greater demands of Jesus, they trivialise them by saying, “Nooo, Jesus didn’t really mean that! He was just exaggerating his message so we’d get the point. We’ve already got the point, so this demand isn’t to be taken so literally”. But it’s also strange how these very same people interpret the promises of Christ literally.

Then there are those who deeply desire to follow the way of the Kingdom but realise just how handicapped they are. They look into the greater demands of Christ and are bewildered at what he asks of them. Then they contemplate on the unfathomable love of Christ and realise that they owe it to walk in obedience towards him. But they’re damaged icons, unable to truly render to Christ that which he asks. Not because they refuse to, but because they do not possess the capacity to do so. They look to heaven, beat their chests, and say, “Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner”.

Christ looks to the first and says, “What of you?”, and then he looks to the second and says, “Come, run into my arms”.

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As a sufferer, I’ve gradually discovered that there’s one thing people like us need beyond anything any counselor or doctor can provide. We need fellow companions to journey with us in our suffering.

Companions who will be the ears of God to hear us, the hands of God to hold us, and the feet of God to take us where we need to go.

The language that emanates from this companionship amidst the untold suffering is a language of love, of deep spirituality, of God.

Posted by SK at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your deepest problem is no different from humankind’s most fundamental problem. You need to be loved, accepted, wanted, and to know that the world is different because you exist.

This problem has manifested itself in thousands of different ways in human history. Human persons, in longing to know that their presence makes a difference, strive to validate their existence in various ways.

Whilst you may think that your particular manifestation of the human problem is perhaps more excruciating than that of others, it might be more beneficial to see yourself as an incarnation of humanity’s most fundamental need.

Then you can also move on to be moulded into an incarnation of the solution to that need.

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You have been deeply damaged through the years by the mystery of suffering.

Sometimes the damage becomes so confrontational that you agonise over the overwhelming gulf between who you really think you are and who you really want to be.

The truth is, who you think you are is vastly different from who you really are. But to know who you really are, you must look beyond yourself towards the defining source, who is also the source of all light. If you keep looking at yourself, you lose your bearings and see only grim darkness.

You are not in darkness. If you were truly in darkness, you would not know light. The very desire within you to walk in the light, to live in the light, to love in the light, points to your having been touched by light in your life. You have tasted light, and that is why you desire light.

Don’t you see, everything you need you already have? You have it more than most others. You are loved. Whilst you may spend your days trying to convince yourself of this reality, others are busy loving you in no superficial measure. Long not for a gift you already have.

Be inspired by love, that you may inspire love. Because you are the beloved.

Posted by SK at 7:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“...every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.”

A quote from Henri Nouwen

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Sure, we live in a world that needs grace, a world that needs to understand and experience forgiveness.

But sometimes we forgive ourselves too easily. We allow ourselves to lax into a state of indiscipline in our spirituality and an inconsideration for the wellbeing of our neighbour, simply because we don’t feel like we are in the right form on a particular day or during a particular season.

And then we very conveniently dispense forgiveness to ourselves, thinking that it is all right to be like that every now and then, and that God understands. We think that after all, we’ve already grown so much and done so much of this and that for God and for others, what’s wrong with failing sometimes.

The reality of falling once in a while is true and understandable. We are human after all. But the attitude with which we treat ourselves after having fallen is undesirable if we do not resolve to learn from each failure, to be better and to be more consistently loving.

Cheap grace is demeaning to the cause of the Kingdom. It’s not so much an issue of perfection as it is an issue of the habit of the heart.

Lord, have mercy on me. On us.

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The true test of giving is not in the giving itself. The true test lies in what you're giving for and what u expect in return. These motivations are very crucial; crucial to the integrity of giving itself.

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"Love and say it with your life."

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You can know that people are going through the notions of a religious form when they listen to a sermon but do not expect the sermon to challenge them to any action; when all they expect is a sermon that is informative - and if entertaining, it’s a bonus - but does not propel one to re-examine his worldview and underlying motives for certain behaviour patterns he exhibits; when all people want is a sermon to bring them just a little bit farther in their journey but not require a reconfiguration of their lives.

Perhaps the thought of having to reconfigure our lives and being told that we’ve not really been living the Christian life as it was meant to be are rather repulsive messages to receive. Even if we know this to be true, it still upsets us when the implications of such sermons are driven home.

Of course, it’s true that some preachers are, by way of their personalities, plainly brash and naturally harsh even when the occasion doesn’t call for it. Such preachers need to be told that the point of the issue has been taken well, but that the medium was inappropriately matched with the message. If people are “offended” by a sermon, it has to be the essence of the message itself which has caused the offence, not the personality of the preacher.

It really does take guts for a preacher to verbally identify the things in life that are but shouldn’t be, and the things in life that aren’t but should be. And half the time, as he speaks these messages, the messages judge him too. I remember a wise guide once telling me and my bunch of friends (all newly trained homileticians) some years ago, “I find that if you try to practise what you preach, you’ll be in trouble, because you’re bound to fail. I make it a point to preach what I’m already practising.” In other words, don’t compel people to do things you’re not yourself willing to do, and don’t obligate people to live the way you’re not already living. These are some guidelines a young preacher would do well to observe.

But never lose sight of the purpose of a sermon. I was told by my seminary lecturer from the first day of my studies in the seminary: “The purpose of your sermon must be to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed. Your sermon must obligate people to respond or react, to either love or hate what they hear, and to respond in accordance with that which they love or hate.” And the lecturer went on to say, “Otherwise, don’t bother to preach.”

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Obey, not because you fear making a mistake for which you cannot bear to be responsible.

Obey, not because you think the opinions and instructions of the one above you in authority are worthy of your following.

Obey, not because you trust in the greater wisdom of the teacher above you.

Obey, not because the prospects of your future depend on your subservience.

Obey, because you love.

"Love and obedience are travelling companions. Obedience is, therefore, to be seen in relational terms, for true obedience springs from love."

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It is such a cliché to say that life is fragile, we never know how long or how short our life journeys will last. But it’s no longer a cliché when it proves true, and death befalls someone you know, someone you love, or someone you’re used to having around you. The powerlessness of the cliché then becomes a dark cloud that surrounds your soul, an unspoken weariness that hangs over your consciousness.

It’s good to think about death every once in a while, especially when one is entrenched in an ethos which is preoccupied with the obsession to live this earthly life for as long as possible (and to even cheat death, if possible).

Death brings a sudden silence; a silence which those who are alive never really care to cultivate. This is perhaps why the sudden silence emerges when death befalls, because the momentousness of life abruptly ceases and the spirit within us is shocked from the inertia of speed and sound. Cultivation of silence as a habit of the heart is a good preparation for death.

Death can be a form of healing for those who find life unbearingly painful. This is not to say that the prerogative of life and death belongs to the person himself, but rather, that God’s “administering” of physical death to a person can be seen as a way of providing relief. Of course, such healing brings pain to those alive. But at times, the pain felt by those who are ill is so excruciating that even at death, those alive heave a sigh of relief at the release which the ill person experiences in death.

It might seem strange that death be articulated in such positive overtones. But aren’t we the ones who have cheated death, literally, since we belong to the One who has trampled down death by death? Death may get the better of us, but we will get the best out of death.

Posted by SK at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most mothers in this part of the world, if not all, nag (although mine doesn’t, glory to God, hallelujah). One of the things I frequently hear mothers nag over is the fact that their lazy children are too much of slugs to source for more nutritious food other than instant noodles; for some, it’s a daily diet (both the noodles and the nagging). Thus the oft-heard line: “Don’t keep on eating instant noodles! It’s not good for your health, you know! Can get cancer, you know!”, followed by the rattling off of a story of a young man in a distant land feeding on instant noodles every day and his consequential sudden demise.

I don’t know the science of instant noodles and how dangerous they may be. But there are two things I know about instant noodles: 1) They are fast to cook, which makes people keep opting for instant noodles when they have neither the patience nor the motivation to whip up a good meal; and 2) They are good to eat, which makes people keep wanting to eat them. And as we appetise ourselves over a bowl of instant noodles, the last thing on our minds is how detrimental each pack of these noodles may be for our health. As the Chinese community here often says (translated), “Eat first, consider later”.

Instant noodles are a quick fix for a hungry appetite. And on the same token, I’m afraid we have many such quick fixes in our Christian communities today. We have a quick way of fixing our church institutional mechanisms through the host of church models available in the Christian market today. If you have the model franchised and the numbers to prove it, you’ll be a millionaire. If you’re the pastor of the church and that franchise belongs to you, you’ll become an international household name who needs no salary from your church anymore.

We have a quick way of fixing our discipleship. We have the different training programmes in our churches which “produce disciples” through mere two- or three-hour training classes or weekend training camps.

We have a quick way of fixing our broken spirituality. We have professional live bands “leading worship” in the church which arouse the emotions to the fullest of their abilities, making us feel more spiritual than before we began singing and waving our hands in the air. This also leaves us wondering when the effect might start wearing off before we may need new doses of spiritual morphine again.

We have a quick way of fixing our inabilities to do theological reflection. We have rhetorically competent preachers (or at least preachers who try to be so) giving us very concise and clear instructions on how we should live our lives in a way that “pleases God”, drawing black and white to the very precise boundaries of their margins. They’re so precise and sure in their instructions, the listeners practically do not need to think any further.

And amidst all this frenzy over “instant noodle spirituality”, we’re still going about looking for quicker ways to be quick, so that we might be quicker than those who are already quick. One of the pressures of being a leader of a Christian community is that of reckoning with what the people want, and most often, they want instant noodles. And we give it to them because we need people in the church. Well, thus says the wisdom of the mothers:

“Don’t keep on eating instant noodles! It’s not good for your health, you know! Can get cancer, you know!”

Posted by SK at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Some environments just feel unsafe. Some other environments are unsafe. They are unsafe because they’re guarded by a thousand and one pharisaical minds who gauge everything by rules and regulations, with little or no regard for the only rule that matters: the rule to love.

It is strange how we regulate life in our communities with rules, assuming that when people observe those rules, they keep themselves from “sinning” or doing wrong and therefore do not offend God. I’d understand a need for guiding principles and various guidelines in a community’s “rule of life”. But rules and regulations?

All people within a community can be well observing every policy, every procedure, every rule, and every regulation, and yet flouting that one rule most fundamental to the ontology of community. I believe that when we choose to take the longer route of teaching, showing and modelling love, we might realise after a period of time that there is no need for airtight rules and regulations any longer.

I ‘m not saying it’s the most practical way of dealing with life together. I’m saying it’s the only way if we choose to remain true to the essence of life together. It’s an ideal, yes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t choose to strive towards its attainment in the present scheme of things.

Afterthought: Some further thoughts several hours later.
It's hazardous to flout the ritual law for the sake of the moral law; you get condemned and punished for it by people who don't understand, who refuse (?) to understand. But by all means, ignore the moral law and fixate yourself on the observance of the ritual law; you will be counted among the righteous of the land. It is sad.

Posted by SK at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are times when we can be so utterly sure of a vision to make an impact in the world or to change the state of the church from her present imperfection. And yet, we tread along this path of endeavouring to bring change to the world only to discover that it was our very hearts and lives that God had set his eyes upon all along. To our horror, it was us whom he'd wanted to change before transforming the world.

A vision to impact the world or to bring change in the church invokes a sense of excitement and purpose. But in the same breath, it could also constitute no less than a symptomatic expression of a preoccupation with self-significance. To carry a vision from God could, in the final analysis, after all just be another expression of human vanity. It is as if being the carrier of a divine vision places one on a higher plane of significance than that of other insignificant mortals.

For this reason, it is crucial that God works on the life of the vision-carrier before he entrusts the vision into the hands of the carrier. So that it will transcend a mere gratification of the human hunger for significance and a self-defined purpose that is divinely affiliated. The heart of the vision-carrier needs to be pruned of all self-absorbtion, self-preoccupation, self-preservation, and self-defence. Then only can the sacredness of the divine vision remain untainted in the hands of its carrier. Otherwise, the integrity of the vision itself lies in question.

It is commonly said that one cannot carry a vision unless one was willing to die for it. Perhaps the scheme of God's purpose is such that one cannot carry a vision unless one was already dead to it. Then only can one be sure that the vision is the unreserved possession of God and not one's own to have and to hold. Then only will the sacredness of the vision remain untainted.

When is a man ready to carry a vision inspired of God? When he sees nothing else but the cross. When the cross is so meaningful that even the vision cannot match its significance. One should carry a divinely inspired vision only when the cross is the sole vision one can see.

Posted by SK at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We are our biggest obstacle.

If we don't kill ourselves, we stop ourselves from being bigger than ourselves.

Posted by SK at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We stand before the cross to gaze at what has been watered by the generous shedding of blood so murderous it has become a tree of life for we who were once dead.

And we keep standing and gazing, for what is there left to say...

Posted by SK at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lord, there is something I must discuss with you. It’s about the issue of allegiance.

If I have to choose what to render to you and what not to, you don’t blame me, do you?

I mean, it’s really a hard world to live in. I have to cope with demands from many parties.

You’re not the only one I have to live for you know. I have to grapple with demands from my employers, my family, my church leaders… and then there’s you…

It’s hard trying to ensure that everybody’s happy with me. You understand, right?

I know you say that all of me belongs to you. But surely you must know that this is purely religious talk which can’t possibly apply in the real world.

If I lived as if all of me belonged to you, my life would be finished.

What will happen to my career which necessitates some measure of compromise on my personal religion? And if my career goes down, what happens to my family?

I have children to school and feed, and I have a wife who needs to be proud of me. You understand, right?

I don’t think anyone would blame me if I thought for myself. I don’t think anyone would dare blame me. And you shouldn’t too, since I’m just being like everyone else.

Posted by SK at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The grieving world continues to delude itself as the many people contained within it furiously construct new realities - countless new worlds - that they may find elusive happiness in those synthetic climates of emotional security.

Deep within, some of them grieve those things they’ve lost whilst others grieve the absence of those things they never had. Each, in his own unique way, expresses those needful things in his life. Strangely, even if many of these "needful things" are projected to take on the form of things, almost inevitably, it's a person who was once lost and caused grief.

Some say that grief is but a gradual process which eventually brings one towards wholeness, that grief eventually ceases. I beg to differ. I think the scars of our painful pasts invoke a grief which lasts throughout our lifetimes. At some point, the grief no longer paralyses us, but yet, we express that loss through certain mechanisms which generate a sense of hope just so we feel that we can perhaps cope with the grief throughout this life.

Some have grieved for so long they can’t imagine a life without it. I've lived almost all my life with people who were and are still grieving. They spend their entire lives trying to compensate that which they’ve lost. Some others even over-compensate just so they feel justified. Perhaps only then can they be somewhat convinced that this world into which they were born is a world regulated by justice. They need to know it, just so they can survive in it.

Grief produces a kind of energy, an energy which renders a certain power to the griever. This energy can either damage or develop others. Our scars can be a source from whence temporal healing is found, or they can be the ugly source from which flows the further debilitation of human life. The art of nurturing grief must be mastered creatively, craftily and delicately, lest it masters you.

Editor's Note: This is a related article worth reading and pondering over.

Posted by SK at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s easier to be nice than to love people.

It’s easier to do kind favours that cause people to like us than to love enough to refuse helping someone fulfil his perceived need. Likeability works to our advantage.

It’s easier to remain silent without pointing out someone else’s faults than to love enough to speak with honesty and directness into a person’s life. Diplomacy works to our advantage.

It’s easier to just accept others and remain blind to areas of their lives that need improvement than to love enough to take responsibility for their personal growth. Superficiality works to our advantage.

Niceness, diplomacy, friendliness, and helpfulness can be the most deceitful ways of being selfish. Loving is never that easy, because truly and deeply loving others can sometimes be the most hideously offensive thing to do.

The two often look alike, but one seeks the wellbeing of the self whilst the other seeks the wellbeing of the neighbour. Are you loving or just being nice?

Posted by SK at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

We grow up in a church culture that cultivates the sense of religious piety in us. We sing with emotion, and in response lift our hands and sway them to the sensation of the moment (sometimes just because others are doing likewise). And in our songs and our prayers, we profess to be the very ones who - very much like Peter when he was naïve - would follow Christ to the ends of the earth, who’d give up everything in life just to share in God’s dream. And we’re pretty sure we mean what we say.

Until reality hits.

And when God begins dealing with the things we hold dear in life, challenging us to shed these self-motivated dreams and ambitions one by one and bit by bit, suddenly the weight of the cross seems quite cumbersome. It gets in the way of our happiness, or at least it seems that way. It’s as if God doesn’t want us to be happy.

Some people respond to this challenge by trying to scheme their way around the demands of the Kingdom. They silently work their lives out in a way that enables them to drown themselves in affluence whilst still spewing the same self-denying confessions in church each week, hoping that nobody would notice the incongruence. They get by. In fact, more than that, they’re the ones who’re often seen as the most respectable people in the church institution. They eventually become treasurers, stewards, and board members.

God wants us to embrace the life of simplicity because he knows it’s only through simplicity that our hearts can be open to true and pure happiness in life. To live a life of simplicity is a choice. Contentedness in life is a choice. We cannot blame the influence of the materialistic self-glorifying world for the narcissistic choices we make for our own lives. Self-elevation is not a new problem; it’s a perennial age-old disease.

Posted by SK at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world is more broken than we think it is (or maybe, than we care to know). Life can be more painful than most of us expect. However, I’ve found that many of my friends who’ve been confronted by the excruciating realities in their lives are strangely able to gaze at their brokenness with a profound tone of laughter.

No, not flippancy. Just laughter. Pure happy laughter.

It puzzled me initially.

But now I think I understand. One thing that keeps life sustainable, which perhaps even helps restore some emotional and mental health to those who’ve been mercilessly scarred and battered by the storms of life, is humour.

At some point of life, when pain has so dulled one’s sense of survival in a stormy life, when even the most skilled psychotherapists can’t succeed in restoring one’s will to sail through the rest of his life journey, the divinely ordained mechanism for restoration comes through - humour.

We can laugh all we want at the silliest jokes and the wackiest humour we may have come across, but it’s those who’ve been through hopeless despair who truly know the value of humour and who value laughter. The rest of the world may be just laughing.

Sometimes I see people like these laughing at their brokenness, and I realise how insufficiently broken I am. Maybe I must be broken enough just so I can learn to laugh at life. Or laugh my way through life. Or has it already happened?

Posted by SK at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Everybody keeps saying they need your time, your encouragement, your patience and all that jazz. And that's what you try to keep offering - time, patience, encouragement.

But after a while, you begin to be treated as the infinite source from which flows an unending supply of these virtues. It's as if this is a given which will never cease. You become more than human.

And when you suddenly can't find it in yourself to offer these things anymore for a moment, and you need someone to offer you time, patience, and encouragement - you find no one. Because they've been given your time, patience, and encouragement; and they've found enough energy to flee to other places to attend to other indulgences, and they tire themselves there rather than waste their resources on you.

So you just sit with yourself - dry. Because you're not supposed to expect anything in return. Give when others need from you. But when you're in need, sit down and shut up, because you shouldn't expect people to make time for you. Everyone has a right to complain when they're tired. Except you.

So what if all you want is a bit of their time, just so that they can tell you they know you're there? Fancy thinking you're significant enough for such acknowledgement.

Just sit and watch them going nowhere fast, hardly noticing you're there. Don't try to whine for help, because you musn't get in their way. In time when they need your time, patience, and encouragement, they'll come back.

Welcome to the Kingdom life.

Posted by SK at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are those who ask because they desire to learn the ways of the Kingdom. These are those who truly seek to know what they don’t already know. Their hearts are open to the realities of the Kingdom, and they so wish that their eyes would be open too. To these, do not conceal the heartbeat of the Kingdom to them, for it is ordained that these who seek the Kingdom will gradually find their way to it and eventually find themselves dancing to the rhythm of its life.

There are also those who ask because they desire to ensnare, knowingly or unknowingly. They ask because they know the Kingdom is not for them. So they need to know what it is they’re not living out, for these are the very things they need to discredit in order to justify their choices. To these, the Kingdom must remain a secret. Their eyes are blinded and their hearts are hardened, no matter how “Christian” they think they are.

For these latter types, do not feel that you have a rightful duty to explain the ways of the Kingdom to them, for they’re not there to understand. Do not feel apologetic about allowing the things of the Kingdom to be concealed from them. For as you discern their spirits, you’ll see the waywardness of their inquisitive minds. And if you reveal to them the things of the Kingdom, you’re subjecting the rest of your Kingdom-mates to their mindless ridicule and merciless accusations.

In your desire to help them understand, don't compromise the safety of your fellow pilgrims to the predators. Conceal what needs to be concealed. To them, speak in riddles. Keep them guessing. Because the Kingdom is not something they want. It's not for them.

Be innocent. But be shrewed. Be pure, but not foolish.

Posted by SK at 1:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Either way, there'll inevitably be a time when living within intimate Trinitarian communities (like the early church did) begins to invoke a social cost. Those who previously exalted you get disappointed at just how human you can be after all, and those who previously looked at you with disdain simply persist in this rhythm of perception.

What should one do? Go around explaining to everyone what it means to live the Kingdom life, what it means to stand on the side of the marginalised (or even what the term "marginalised" actually means), and what it has cost us who have chosen to embrace this life? And then they'll just be convinced and let us work out our convictions in peace? And if we're lucky, we'll get their blessings too? One can only wish it were that simple.

Some realities about the Kingdom life can only be understood when they're lived out. They can't be adequately explained when people demand an explanation or justification for what we're doing or who we're trying to be. Conviction grows when we've tasted these realities and we know them to be true even if we have no adequate words to use in attempting to describe them.

So we keep living out the dream anyway - because we know of no higher way.

Posted by SK at 4:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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).

Understanding this from a Trinitarian perspective – which is essentially the foundation of our Christian faith anyway – one would realise that the “image” concerns God’s Trinitarian nature. If God has existed in all eternity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – COMMUNITY – then the impartation of his “image” must mean the communication of his Trinitarian communal nature. We are made in the image of God such that we possess the capacity and the desire to live in community.

The Fall, which is traditionally understood as a “rebellion” against God, might be more accurately seen as the severance of humanity’s life in community with God and with one another, as well as with all creation. Consequently, sin may be appropriately seen as an inability to live in community; perhaps even an aversion towards life in community. Perhaps it is true then that sin always takes place in a social setting. After all, the failure to love God and one’s neighbour involves an “otherly” dimension.

The human race has forgotten that it was created for life in community. The remnant of the distorted image which John Calvin talks about is observable in our inclination towards having a “social life” or sorts. So in that sense, we are still the “social animals” Aristotle spoke about. But the brokenness of the image is distinctly vivid in the way we draw boundaries between ourselves and other people for the sake of our own emotional, physical, and mental survival. It is also made apparent in the way we feel a sense of intrusion when others invade our private space.

We have forgotten that we were created by community for community. And we have forgotten how to live in community. The norm for communal living has shifted from intimate Trinitarian communities to one of superficial non-threatening relationships. Even for Christians.

Posted by SK at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Whom a person chooses to hang out with at the table significantly speaks of his self-understanding in terms of his social identity and status. If you’re a middle-class professional, it’s almost inevitable that you’d be seen eating with others like yourself. This is the social system under which we exist – you’re planted in a social order wherein you find others like yourself. You work with them, do church with them, and go to places they frequent. So you eat with them.

At one level, we may say that the gospel necessitates us to sit with others like ourselves because we have to “reach out” to them, since we can speak their language. We often call this “marketplace ministry”, and I don’t desire to dispute the legitimacy of such efforts.

But at another level, the gospel of the Kingdom calls for something more radical. We’re called to be found at the table with people whom others never care to sit with, to eat from plates that others couldn’t bear to share from. We’re called to go and eat with those who have less than us; not just by sharing our middle-class food with them, but by also partaking in their lives by sharing in their lower class food.

The difficult part about this is probably not so much the doing it itself – the difficulty is found in making it a preference. To sit and dine with the marginalised just because it’s a Christian duty just doesn’t quite match the ethos of the Kingdom. The call of the Kingdom is for us to love the marginalised so much that we find our own middle-class social consciousness distasteful, and eventually find our authentic existence by sharing the table with the marginalised. And to prefer being there.

Posted by SK at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I do wonder if there seems to be an over-emphasis on the total depravity and the total inability of humankind. I know that if Karl Barth were to be alive and somehow found his way into the e-world, he’d probably initiate a turbulent debate with me over this in the “comments” column. But I’m truly beginning to think if perhaps there’s at least some truth in the argument for human potential advanced by those we frequently call the “liberals” (if you’re from America, I’m not referring to the political liberals but the theological liberals).

I’m increasingly beginning to find that when we expressly show that we don’t believe in people’s potentials and aren’t willing to trust in their abilities, they actually fall for that lie. Conversely, if we show that we believe in their ability to achieve and exhibit a level of trust and confidence in them, they try their best to live up to it - and many actually hit the mark. I experienced this even with my students in the seminary. Some of the students actually did better for my subject than they did for other subjects. It isn't to my credit. All I did was believe in them and show them that I did. They did everything else themselves.

I see parents who’re extremely earnest, but who look at their children’s faults and shake their heads in disapproval. I see teachers who toil days on end at work, but who talk to their students as if they’re lesser people and have no capacity to understand the deeper things. I see middle-class Christians who give generously to poorer neighbours, but do so as if they’re doing them (or maybe even God) a favour.

What’s the point of doing all these things if we cannot somehow see things through the eyes of the God who touched the lepers, sat with the sinners, and loved the adulteress? What’s the point of disseminating our privileges to others if we cannot help people to receive from us with dignity and help them realise that somehow they too can be better people than they already are? We may not realise this, but when we give to others without honouring their dignity, it actually further robs them of their inherent worth.

When we approach the world with the lenses of total depravity, we likewise treat others as if they’re more depraved than us. But when we appreciate the value of the human person and of all creation, we begin to accord honour and trust to others because we believe that they too can become like us. And maybe they too can even help us become better people.

Posted by SK at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

There would be no need for sermons, if our lives were shining; there would be no need for words, if we bore witness with our deeds. There would be no pagans, if we were true Christians.

- St John Chrysostom -

Posted by SK at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear fellow students and learners at the seminary,

Welcome. Welcome to a brand new academic year. And if you’re new to the theological world, welcome to the world of scholarly labours.

Welcome to an arena of Christian study, wherein your worth will very much be gauged by your academic performance. It is a circle wherein you’ll be extremely known if you’re either excellently intellectual or devastatingly challenged in your academic performance. And if you’re mediocre, then you’ll be… well, just you. Perhaps this description doesn’t sound all too encouraging. But it is nevertheless descriptive of reality, I kid you not. But still you are here; so perhaps allow me to share three basic secrets of seminary survival which have worked well for me.

Firstly, remember that you’re worth every bit of respect and honour because of what you’ve decided to give up in life to spend the next three or four years in the seminary (assuming that you have given up something, of course). And this respect and honour must be accorded to you regardless of your academic performance in the seminary. You can be sure that you’ll often be short-changed of your well-deserved dignity, but let that not rob you of your consciousness that the Father whom you love and serve looks upon you with favour. No matter how you may be treated henceforth, in the seminary and in the ministry, live with dignity. And always strive to treat others with dignity and respect. You don’t want to eventually become like those who lord it over you. Be the servant and the friend that Jesus was to the people.

Secondly, remember that you should never expect to find anymore grace here than you’ve found in the world out there. The depraved human beings you’ve been in touch with in the broken world are the very same fallen ones you’ll be in contact with henceforth. These sinners will be teaching you (if they happen to be academically qualified enough; never mind the character) and learning and living with you daily. Yes, some will be your lecturers and others your fellow seminarians. Expect them to offend you, to treat you with less respect than you deserve, to withhold grace when you most need it, and to impose the letter of the law upon you without a consciousness of the spirit of the law. When you fail, expect to be judged and even punished for your failure, no matter how repentant you may think you are. Mercy is most often an intellectual concept to be spoken about, not a virtue in praxis. But amidst all this, you will find some others who’ll truly be your fellow pilgrims in your life and faith journey, now and perhaps even beyond your seminary and ministerial life. From them, you’ll learn what it means to offer grace; to be grace. Hang on to these and be loyal to them; you won’t regret it.

Thirdly, remember that if you can’t seem to see the relevance of your studies for your ministry, it’s entirely not your fault. You’ve just been placed in a system which has plucked you out of your natural environment and planted you in an artificial incubatory environment, hoping to mould a great minister out of you through mostly intellectual exercises and some ancillary exercises which are hoped to cultivate an attitude of servitude within you. This system wasn’t created by those who sustain it now. It was created by others who passed it down to those who’re now charged with the task of perpetuating it without being critical of its existing deficiencies. Or at least, they must pretend they don’t see its deficiencies. But this systemic failure must never qualify as an excuse for your inability to reconcile your intellectual pursuits with practical ministerial relevance. It is you who must strive to translate every bit of intellectual knowledge you acquire into a visible expression of life. The onus is upon you. Do not remain fixated on those around you who seem to have failed to do so, lest you also become one of them. Focus on what truly matters.

Perhaps this may just be one of those periods in your life when you actually manage to catch a glimpse of God in the darkest moments, a ray of hope in the most devastating situations. And when you know he’s there, you’re ready to begin a life of real ministry. I wish you well.

Fellow learner,
Sherman

Posted by SK at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When you've committed a terribly foolish mistake in life, you know you need grace. And God does - he always - has enough grace to forgive, sustain and restore a broken life. He embraces tenderly the one who comes to him in helplessness and places him on a place of dignity. He makes the sinner become truly human.

When trespasses have been committed and grace is much needed, it's often not God who's the problem - it's people who can't find the capacity within themselves to forgive. Repent all you want and submit all you want to the imposed disciplinary measures as an expression of your state of repentance, they'll never seem satisfied. They'll keep flogging you anyway.

They want your blood if they can have it. With their mouths they'll say they believe there's grace and restoration for the sinner, but with their hands they'll threaten to tear your limbs apart. And they'll keep reminding you how serious your sin is without in the same breath acknowledging they're just as depraved as you are. Had Jesus said in this day and age, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone", I suspect many people wouldn't think twice about picking up some big rocks and await their turns to cast them.

Many people can't find it in their hearts to offer grace when they see someone else committing a wrong which reflects the gravity of their own depravity, so they are bent on inciting wrath and inflicting continuous punishment. But despite this, I'll keep living my life in dignity, not because I think I've not wronged my Lord and my neighbour or trespassed against the virtues of the Kingdom life. At one time or another, we all have - particularly me. But I'll live my life in dignity because of the peace and confidence within me of the measure of God's love and forgiveness.

And amazingly, amidst the agony of rejection and despise, I have found friends who believe in me. Because they know my heart, they have pledged to remain committed to the friendship that we share despite the social cost of being associated with a despicable sinner. It's strange how my life is the same one story but provokes extremely different responses from various people. I suppose those who know grace know how best to offer it too, and those who don't... well, they just don't.

I fear not the fury of the jury, for they're merely incriminating a fellow criminal. They hate the image of themselves they see in me. You can take away my reputation, my ministry, my vocation, and even my life. But I challenge you - try taking away my steadfast confidence in my God... you just try.

Posted by SK at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: This is the last post for the year. I promise!

He was apprehensive. He had been a young pastor of a local church for about five years now but had never attended the Pastors' Fellowship before. It was just about four days before that a friend of his, also a pastor of another local church in the same town, mentioned that there was a Pastors' Fellowship which met every Thursday night. He wasn't sure that he'd be interested to participate in yet another programme. After all, the church activities alone were enough to wear a pastor out. The last thing he needed was another commitment to break the camel's back.

Upon his friend's persuasion, he decided to give it a try anyway... but with much hesitance. He couldn't imagine sitting through another formal meeting of pastors hanging around one another in their clerical collars and trying to look as uprightly holy in one another's eyes. As if the expectations of their own church members weren't enough. But still, he gave it a try.

On the Thursday evening, he stepped into the Pastors' Fellowship meeting and was greeted warmly as they always do to newcomers. As they began with sumptuous refreshments, he thought it was a good way to begin a meeting - just like all church fellowships. But after over half an hour of refreshments and seemingly superficial conversations, he began to feel that something was amiss, because they didn't seem like they were intending to begin a meeting of any sort!

But eventually, the pastors did seem to start clustering together, although none of them seemed to be in a rush of any sort. Considering their busy schedules, this was rather an anomaly. Anyway, he joined the cluster that seemed to be forming itself very automatically.

As the "meeting" begun and some of them were still holding cups of drinks in their hands, a very senior looking man in their midst initiated what seemed to be a very informal conversation. He asked, "How have all of you been, my friends?" And strangely, the rest of the pastors actually seemed keen to respond to the question, and they began chatting about life as if they were around trusted old friends. This newcomer now began to feel that something was different about this group of pastors - or were they really friends after all? It felt almost... safe.

As he was entertaining his thoughts, someone in the group abruptly lifted his hands, looking pretty nervous and yet earnest about something he obviously had to say. The senior friend in the group nodded towards him, and everyone looked at him to listen to what he had to say. What followed was an occasion in the life of this young pastor which shook him internally, as that man spoke his heart...

"Brothers, I need your help", that pastor said, looking anxious. "I've been indulging myself with internet pornography in the past several months, and I think I'm getting deeper and deeper into it. It's almost uncontrollable. Please... help me..."

What was most shocking was that nobody in the room looked shocked. Nobody looked confused. Nobody looked angry. Nobody looked unsure. He could almost swear they all looked... loving?

From that point onwards, everything else in that entire meeting was focused on the need of this one man. They collectively released messages of grace upon him. Within that group itself, there and then, they began establishing relational infrastructures for this pastor to sustain accountable relationships to people who could help him find restoration. And he gladly received what they offered, for he sat among friends who loved and accepted him.

"John", the senior pastor said to him, "we're grateful at your openness and trust in us to share in your journey and struggle. We love you. And we want you to know that your struggle doesn't make you any less a minister than any of us, for no one here is less a fallen person than you feel you are. We will take care of you, brother." Lots of hugs and tears were exchanged that evening.

This young pastor who had visited the Pastors' Fellowship left the gathering with much to think about. He realised something very fundamental to his ministerial life - he had never felt safe before. Not among his church members, and certainly never around other pastors. But tonight, he realised that what he needed most was a safe community among his fellow pastors. And that his role as a fellow pilgrim in the life of his faith community was to provide a safe environment of love, acceptance and restoration to those who desired to follow Jesus.

It's not a safe world. And unfortunately, it's not a safe church. Yet.

Posted by SK at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember the earlier days of ministry when I used to be rather bold in my undertakings. I'd think nothing of walking into an orphanage or a drug rehabilitation centre, just to connect with the people there and to make them my friends. Or to walk along the streets of the city and to have chats with the beggars I saw there. It was very much a regular feature of my life. It was, in fact, a lifestyle.

But it was quite a high price to pay to live such a lifestyle. The fact is, a Christian who lives a lifystyle like this does not live within the normative prescription of urban Christianity. So in the process, I got some very painful kicks in my behind from my church leaders. As an urban Christian, I was taught to pursue the good life: to amass wealth, to pursue upward mobility, and in the process convert some people and take them to church... all for the glory of God!

Over time, I "matured". I learned to conform. Even when I did go connect with people in those places, I did it silently, as if it was a wrong that I should hide from the knowledge of my religious community. This was my sincere way of abiding by the orders of my leaders: "You're a very threatening character, did you know that? Don't rock the boat!"

But recently, I'm challenged all over again as I observe a faith community - in the heart of an urban area - gearing themselves up to go out into the slums. Care to participate in Soul Action?

It's not just about us helping downtrodden people who need some love and help. It's also about us finding the magnitude of our own love challenged for God and our neighbour. Just when you think you love deeply enough, you realise - through these interactions with the unloved and the unlovable - that your love isn't nearly as deep as the way God would have you love.

We have a lot to work on. Before we even think of gospelising the world, I think the modern church needs to work on thoroughly gospelising herself first. Learn from those who're doing it right. If you ask me, I'd say this is ultimate spirituality. It's not merely about dispensing the sacraments, but about being in the world as real sacraments of Christ, dispensing the grace of God in real time to real people.

It's not about religion, it's all about soul.

Posted by SK at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was younger, I used to visit the home of my Muslim friend. And I noticed how his mum would cook large portions of food even if there were only, say, five people at home for lunch or dinner. So I'd ask her why she cooked so much.

She said, "You never know, somebody might come along and say he's hungry. And we want to have enough food for people who want to eat, you know. Our house can be small and congested, and our things may be simple; but we must always make sure that anyone who comes has their basic needs met. So always have food on the table."

At that time, I had never seen something like that before. As long as there was enough food for everyone present and no one had to go hungry, I didn't see why there was a need for us to cook extra food. I mean, what if no one actually ate the food and it went to waste? Or what if it caused everyone to eat more than they should, and people in the house began to put on weight? Didn't seem like a very clever idea to me.

One day, I saw an old lady walk into the house when the gate was wide open. She was dirty-looking and rather frail. She had nothing on her except a plastic bag that had what looked like pieces of rags in it. She walked right into the kitchen, greeted my friend's mother, and sat down at the table and started treating herself to the food on the table. After eating, she smiled at my friend's mother, and left.

When she'd left, I asked my friend's mother who this old lady was. Her answer was, "I dunno. She comes by once in a while to eat though."

Then I understood. Always have food on the table. Your home can be small and congested, and your things may be simple, but always have food on the table.

Posted by SK at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In regard to this issue, I wonder if any of us actually think we're less sinners than Haggard is. If we do, then we've just fallen into the trap of the Pelagian heresy, and that makes us just as much sinners as we make him out to be. Sin is innate in the constitution of the human person. Whilst some people's condition of sinfulness manifests itself through sexual vulnerabilities, some other people's condition of sinfulness manifests itself through a strange form of pharisaism.

I believe in what God is doing in Haggard's life. Whilst many may be pained by the unfortunate series of events that have recently taken place in his life, let's not forget the prospects of his contribution to the Kingdom. For many years, Haggard may have been a key figure in North American Evangelicalism. But this experience will eventually bring him to a place from which he can speak past the legalisms of the Christian religion.

After today, as he progresses towards restoration, he will be a minister who sees and speaks into the heart of real Kingdom matters. He will possess the power to see things that leave others guessing and speak with such depth in regard to the realities of the human soul. He'll speak of something beyond the significance of the 14 thousand and the 30 million, beyond the television interviews and the stage lightings.

Read Sunflower's reflection and Alwyn's reflection and Winsome One's reflection on this issue. Scot McKnight observes,

1. Christians, and not just pastors, do not feel free to disclose sins to anyone.

2. Christians, including pastors, sin and sin all the time.

3. Christians, including pastors, in evangelicalism do not have a mechanism of confession.

4. Christians and pastors, because of the environment of condemnation of sin and the absence of a mechanism of confession, bottle up their sins, hide their sins, and create around themselves an apparent purity and a reality of unconfessed/unadmitted sin.

5. When Christians do confess, and it is often only after getting caught, they are eaten alive by fellow evangelicals - thus leading some to deeper levels of secrecy and deceit.

It takes such pain for God to form ministers who truly understand his heart. And Haggard is a true minister in formation. He's a real reminder that we're sick people; all of us. Surgeries of the soul are delicate; they're seldom painless. But the Master Surgeon will complete his work with great care and skill. And precision.

Posted by SK at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It is one thing to profess Christianity and to adhere to it as a form of religion, but another thing to truly understand the heart of Jesus' concern and to seek to follow it with dedication in one's life.

Christianity as a form of religion is rather simple to follow. All it takes is the observance of some rituals that serve to initiate and retain one in the church institution. If you're seen often enough in the church and contribute enough to the life of the community, nobody really cares if you're living a life that's thoroughly compartmentalised or if you're ignoring (or even defying) all your professed beliefs in other spheres of your life. You can be a professional crook in the marketplace or a business person who thrives on bribery, and yet still be a deacon or an elder in the local church. Really, nobody really cares.

However, Christianity as a path to unity with the divine (theosis), as a spiritual journey in which one seeks to embrace in totality Christ's message of the Kingdom, is bewildering. It's almost oppressive, and yet it sets one free. It's oppressive in the sense that it provokes one to consider the cost of following the way of the Kingdom - it costs you your wealth, your family, your social networks. Actually, its costs you your kingdom, in exchange for an eternal one. It's strange when people profess full commitment to the faith of the Kingdom when its impact on their vocations, their relationships and their wealth remains utterly unchanged. It's almost as if they wished it to be so.

It's difficult to take too seriously what Jesus says in the gospels. Because if we do, we'd know exactly how far we've fallen short of the Christianity he's speaking of. So we settle for a lesser rendition by practising the faith but denying its power.

Posted by SK at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Beauty finds its meaning and source in the uncaused beauty of the Creator himself. All good things come from God. And God desires to give us good gifts, for he is the loving Father and Creator of all. Unfortunately, this is where most of us stop in our understanding of the fatherheart of God.

This is the part we often miss out: God prepares us for the gifts he desires to give us. You see, that which God desires to offer us is often so magnificent and so wonderfully crafted that it takes an extraordinary capacity to receive these gifts. And just as the gift itself is magnificently crafted by its Creator, the receiver of the gift too must be magnificently prepared for the moment when he is ready to receive the gift in all its splendour.

Being nurtured by God's divine hand in order to possess the capacity to receive the magnitude of God's good gifts is a gradual - and often painful - progression. When we're so used to brokenness and shame, the path towards wholeness and righteousness is more narrow than it seems. But we must go through this in order that we are well prepared to receive the good gifts of God.

We often desire for God to make us better people, beautiful in every way. But we forget that the creation of beauty takes a miracle, and that miracle is called "pain". It is only he who possesses the capacity to embrace and transcend beyond the power of pain that truly is a beholder of an authentic beauty of the miraculous kind. In God's scheme of life-formation, pain is a necessity in the creation of beauty. (Sherman Kuek, October 2003)

Posted by SK at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's all rather amazing, how a little child has faith that can move mountains. He listens and believes and acts upon his belief. It's true that there are many grown ups who listen and believe and act upon their belief. But it's equally true that not all these represent the simple faith that Jesus speaks of. In the case of many, it's just a simplistic faith.

When simplicity of faith is not cultivated as a holistic virtue in our lives, what we have is a simplistic faith. The two are different even if they may bear a slight resemblance to each other. One is observable in a person's entire life expression, while the other is a delicate result of selective expression. A person who is simple in the faith abandons himself into the hands of God, whilst a person who is simplistic tries to show that he is abandoned into the hands of God when all along he's really still the one in control. It is naive and pretentious to expect one's self to be in control in other areas of one's life and yet to claim simplicity in obedience to God.

It takes the kind of deep spirituality that a child has in order to live a simple faith. Simplicity of faith isn't something that can be cultivated in a compartmentalised manner in our lives. You can't be simple in one area and then complex and sophisticated in another. It's strange how some adults are so sophisticated in their lifestyles and their handling of wealth, and then claim to be living a simple faith in their life journey. A child has a simple faith because he has nothing; he simply trusts.

Some people have gone too far to ever live a simple faith. They have too much.

Posted by SK at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've never thought there was anyone in this world I'd want to share my life with like this.

Sis tells me you're God's way of showing me he loves me... he created someone just for me.

She's right.

Posted by SK at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not difficult to believe cerebrally in the sovereignty of God when it costs nothing to profess that belief. It's when we are required to act upon that sovereignty - sometimes through what may seem like a passive absence of self-defence - that our deepest belief of that virtue we claim to profess is most tested.

It is when we're most confronted by our total inability to sustain ourselves and a trust in God himself becomes almost our sole means of subsistence that we can truly say, "My God, my sovereign Lord". Further to that, there's no telling how God delivers the one who trusts in him. Sometimes I tend to suspect that death can be a form of deliverance (with the exclusion of self-infliction, of course).

To believe in the sovereignty of God is most difficult if we do not believe in our total inability. Even when we are able, it's because the sovereignty of God enables us. Without a God so sovereign, his love means nothing. For a God whose love is worth depending on must be a God who possesses the capacity to also love sovereignly and express his love sovereignly.

Lord, I want to believe.

Posted by SK at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The depth of unspoken joy is found not in the fleeing emotional bursts of laughter, but in the restful calmness of the soul. Many - followers and non-followers of the Way - have replaced the poverty of their unfulfilled souls with the temporal vanities of life's hurried pace.

Those who have truly come to understand the heart of God eventually arrive at the conclusion that the Christian life consists of living both contemplatively and sacramentally. It is the surest way that one can find himself living with a stillness of soul which finds the depth of the Creator's glorious presence in a noisy world that seeks superficial sensationalism. It is the only way one can ensure that the whispering voice within constitutes the dominant voice in one's life, even finding its power over a thousand shouts.

The follower of Christ who constructs his life upon the quicksand of temporality whores away his soul to a thousand voices that hear not the still small voice of the Master whispering for its return. Inasmuch as he tries to project the aura of spirituality, the reflection in the water doesn't lie.

You have heard many voices. Unworthy voices spoke and you listened. Now hear the voice of the One who whispers in the stillness of your heart.

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me."

Posted by SK at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey Christian,

Howdy? How’s life? I’ll bet you’re enjoying life blatantly every bit as much as I am. Yeah yeah, I know about you and your “Jesus”. To me, he’s nothing more than a spiritual garb you hide behind to justify your love for material success. The only difference between you and me is, I’m honest about my stinkiness, you’re not.

You tell me that you’re climbing this corporate ladder because you want to shine for your Jesus or something like that - I often hear you talk about being “salt and light”. Kid yourself not, for if that was your intention, I wouldn’t see you craving after material wealth as much as I do. But your car is as extravagant as mine, and the size of your house is as wasteful as mine.

You claim that you earn a lot in order that you may give a lot for your religious charity - but it’s quite obvious that you amass most of it for yourself. You couldn’t possibly have thought I was blind, could you? And let me tell you, if you knew how much more I gave to charity than you did, you’d flip. I give to feel good about myself. What about you?

You speculate your money in the stock market, but you criticise me for buying the lottery. I suppose it means I’m gambling and you’re not. You crave that higher position in that new company and obviously see upward mobility as a cherished value in life, but you criticise me for job-hopping in search of better benefits and remuneration. Cummon, have the guts to acknowledge that you love success every bit as much as I do. Have the guts to acknowledge that your Christian religion exalts simplicity in life and that you can’t meet the standards. Don’t pretend, through your double-life, that you’re simple and that you have no self-ambition… if your god existed, he’d know. And you don’t even need a god to know this; even I, a mortal human being, can see right through your pretences.

But of course, when all these things come your way, you get to say “God blessed me with all this! Hallelujah!” When I get these things, I simply say it like it is - I worked hard for the love of money! Who do you think is more honest between us two?

Yeah, I can very easily hear you yelling at me now, “Hey! Don’t judge!” I don’t have to, my friend. If you had an ounce of conscience inside you, your conscience would judge you before anyone else does. The truth is, we are our own gods; it’s just that you have another name for that spiritual alter ego of the carnal you - Jesus. And what was it you called me the other day? An idolater, was it? Hah!

In case you’re wondering if I’m talking about you, yes, I am. I’ll always be a thorn in your flesh (hey, this term comes from your holy book, doesn’t it?) I’ll always be a constant reminder to you that you’re the reason I’m not a Christian. I don’t love you, and I don’t think you love me either. Even when you tried to convert me, it was more because you wanted to secure a heaven for yourself just like you’re doing here on earth. I look at your life, and you affirm my conviction - over and over again - that there is no god.

Yours provocatively,
The Unbeliever

Posted by SK at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

It certainly seems clear to me that he has redefined the meaning of family. From biological affiliations, he has now come to define "family" as a company of people who follow Jesus together and who desire to do God’s will.

But that creates a dilemma for us who have been raised with the proverbial notion, "blood is thicker than water". For this Jesus is categorically claiming that there is now a tie among his followers stronger than any tie between them and their biological families. Their biological ties are earthly and temporal, but our spiritual ties are eternal.

Perhaps Jesus had a purpose for redefining family in this way. He had something to share with the world, and he was gathering all those people who would be willing to listen. He wanted to show the world that God was writing a beautiful story; a story of his Kingdom.

You see, in all eternity, the Trinity God has always existed in an intimate relationship of love and friendship with one another. God has a dream to build a Kingdom that is based on love and friendship, so that the world can be inspired to share that dream. Jesus came to share that dream; to make that dream possible.

In being with the family of God, we are saying that we share in God’s dream to build that Kingdom together. It means that we have our unique places in this story that God is busy writing. Your own story and my own story are to be found only within this larger story of God. Jesus brings us together and says “You are now family; now live your lives before the world - as a family - so that they can see the Kingdom in their midst.”

To live as a newly configured family in order to model God’s Kingdom is no easy feat. These people are hard to get along with; just look at the person sitting next to you in church on Sunday!

Posted by SK at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

They had had many family meetings and discussions about him and what to do with him. Many of the things that he had done throughout the course of his public ministry had brought embarrassment and shame to the family. As if the memory of his birth itself wasn’t already enough to remind them of a past shame.

They finally decided that it was now time to go where he was teaching his disciples, bring him back home, and knock some sense into him. And in addition to that, they had a responsibility to save the reputation of the family (or whatever was left of it). So they went outside the place where Jesus was seated with his disciples and sent one of his disciples in to call him out.

They had no desire to even enter the building to listen to what Jesus was preaching; they would all be nonsensical claims after all. As it was, they were already embarrassed enough to face the public. They certainly had no desire to be seen with those people who were crazy enough to follow their son/brother. Furthermore, they didn’t have to enter. After all, as his family, they commanded the primary right to his attention; they had a higher position than his ministry.

But to the horror of his listeners, he answered his messenger: “Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers". He refused to go out to meet with his family. He pointed to those who were seated around him, who had responded to his call to be with him. There were now spiritual ties between him and them that were far closer than blood ties.

Posted by SK at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even his own family was worried for him. This son and brother of theirs was doing strange things and making strange demands that seemed insane to many people. At times he seemed to be talking as if he was God himself. He delivered strange teachings to large crowds:

"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

"If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

"Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead."

Was he mentally dislocated? Or was he just trying to attain a position of fame in a strange way? Why couldn’t he just be like any other son in other families? Whatever it was, this son and brother of theirs seemed to be full of contradictions as far as his claims were concerned.

He lived his life in such a human way, at times seeming so weak and frail; and yet he often made strong claims, as if the fate of the entire humankind rested upon him. Sometimes his profound teachings were so revolutionary that people would exclaim in reaction, “"Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us?" It offended their senses that a commoner like him would teach such presumptuous things.

He seemed almost schizophrenic. Perhaps he was just an illusive dreamer. Even the respectable people of his time, the bible teachers, accused him of being demon-possessed. And his family echoed this popular opinion that he was literally out of his mind. During his time, being demon-possessed and being insane were synonymous.

Posted by SK at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This perfect young boy had now grown up to be a young man.

He left his home and the carpentry business that his father had left him, took to the streets and started behaving like a loafer. He did wonderful things for the community, which were well and good. But together with that, he was also saying things that shocked the values of the community.

You see, in this community, family was everything. But as he invited people to follow him, their allegiance towards him also had a crucial impact on their family life. Following Christ posed a big threat to families. People who followed him seemed to shift in their self-understanding, and this inevitably caused subversion of family ties.

Sometimes, in following Christ, marital conflict would take place between couples. Occasionally it would even lead to divorce. Some others, upon following Christ, left their homes and families to become itinerant missionaries.

Some people who followed Christ were persecuted by their own family members. Following this Jesus was not exactly the most conducive thing for a happy family life.

Posted by SK at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

News has it that Jesus had brothers and sisters, who were born to Joseph and Mary. Of course, people are busily debating the historicity of this allegation. Scripture seems to shows us that among his brothers were James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, together with a number of unnamed sisters.

Thinking on behalf of a brother or a sister of Jesus... what do you think it is like growing up with a brother who never sins? What was it like for Joseph and Mary to raise a bunch of children who were sinful and one other child who was perfect in all his ways? How would they have explained to their other children the circumstances of their eldest brother’s birth, or justify the reality of his conception before their marriage? Because even if they didn't bother to explain it, the children would've heard the rumours from other kids they played with outside, for their parents would've been talking about it in their homes.

I can imagine that there must've been rumours floating about town years ago when Mary conceived Jesus, saying that the young lady had become pregnant with an illegitimate child. It must've been more than a mere embarassing season in her life and that of her husband-to-be. You know, such stories don't just diminish over time... people talk. And talk. And talk.

By the sheer birth of Jesus alone, the family must have had gone through a lot to salvage a reputation that had been ruined. They had probably lived their lives hoping that memories of Jesus’ pre-marital birth wouldn’t be remembered by anyone. Both the parents and all his sibblings didn't have it easy; there was a dark story that followed them in that community. People talked about them.

To be the family of Jesus was also to live a life of humiliation, right from the time of his birth.

Posted by SK at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is the duty of every professing follower of the Way to make a choice to Christianise his own life and to live out an unwavering commitment to the gospel he claims to embrace. Peter T. Forsythe was right when he said, “The first duty of every soul is to find not its freedom but its Master”. To call one’s self Christian does not automatically mean that Jesus is one’s Master, unless one deliberately chooses it to be so.

To be Christian is to be thoroughly Christianised in every way. Unfortunately, many Christians entrenched in a culture of affluence tend to think that there is an alternative way to be Christian, so another form of Christianity has been popularised today. A.W. Tozer contrasts the two forms of Christianity in The Old Cross and the New :

From [the] new cross has sprung a new philosophy of the Christian life; and from that new philosophy has come a new evangelical technique - a new type of meeting and new type of preaching. This new evangelism employs the same language as of the old, but its content is not the same, and the emphasis not as before.

The new cross encourages a new and entirely different evangelistic approach. The evangelist does not demand abnegation of the old life before a new life can be received. He preaches not contrasts but similarities. He seeks to key into the public view the same thing the world does, only a higher level. Whatever the sin-mad world happens to be clamouring after at the moment is cleverly shown to be the very thing the gospel offers, only the religious product is better.

The new cross does not slay the sinner; it re-directs him. It gears him to a cleaner and jollier way of living, and saves his self-respect...The Christian message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it acceptable to the public. The philosophy back of this kind of thing may be sincere, but its sincerity does not save it from being false. It is false because it is blind. It misses completely the whole meaning of the cross. The old cross is a symbol of DEATH.

Posted by SK at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It often bewilders me how sophistication and complication are values so highly exalted in the Protestant Christianity. Of course, we may expressly deny this in the gospel we preach, but don’t we implicitly take much pride in temporal success and excellence? In some segments of the church, material success is blatantly preached, citing the pursuit of such excellence as a legitimate glorification of God.

Where is the virtue of simplicity once embraced by the faith community? Where is the spirit of continuous, non-programmatised, non-advertised, non-glorified giving for the sake of our neighbour who finds himself in dire need of subsistence? We may claim to have given much, but the proportion in which we have given is unreflective of the measure in which we have received. It doesn’t take more than a mere peek into our church sanctuaries to know we are hoarding luxuries.

But then again, some say it's about being "relevant" to the world, because nobody wants to come into a church full of people who dress like geeks and whose service is conducted with sub-standard equipment and skill. So now we want people to come to church because we dress well and provide superb experience to our "clients"? Some segments of the faith community truly do need to relearn the gospel story all over again.

Has the Protestant Reformation now turned upon itself? Are we now exalting the very corruptions we battled against? Have we fallen under the very judgements we once pronounced? We passed the verdict that they were no longer a true church, but today, uncritically persist in the very corruptions we have condemned.

“What you see before you is a man. A simple monk. I think I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.”

- “The 14th Dalai Lama” in Kundun, 1997 -

Posted by SK at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember how it was so hard to love him. Standing even several metres away from him was in itself a daunting task. You see, he used to gloat at me with the aura of self-righteousness, self-respect and self-exaltation accompanying his presence. And he used to look at me with an air of disdain, a piercing stare that constantly reminded me of how much lesser I was as a person compared to him.

But that was more than a dozen years ago. Several days ago, I met him again. He greeted me, not with a handshake but a bear hug. I extended my hand to shake his warmly, but he simply ignored the extension of my hand and gave me a hug. Within less than a minute, he began sharing with me all that he had been through in the recent years and how he's now struggling with life emotionally, mentally, and physically. The torment in his life was real, I could feel it.

I never thought that I would now think of him with so much tenderness in my heart. There's something in me that shares in his pain and his brokenness... the man who despised me, and who has now become someone whose sorrow I share. I now whisper very intense prayers for him in my quiet moments.

All time belongs to the Almighty. He moulds and breaks lives, all at his appointed time, just so they'll turn to him in true surrender. He does it, just so that one life will be given to him; and so that he may in return give his abundance of life to that one life.

Posted by SK at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past two days, my sustained reflection has rested upon the issue of education. In part, this reflection was provoked by my previous post on "Surviving Independence". One area in which I and many others like me have often been excluded from in my socio-political context is that of tertiary education. We are excluded from privileges and opportunities.

Left: This is where I first received my tertiary education. Bradford, North England, 1998.

But I have also been reflecting more on the pursuit of education itself. Many people pursue undergraduate and postgraduate degrees for various reasons. In a pragmatic culture, degrees are a means to social and economic success. They are a means of enablement for one's pathway to a respectable career and abundant material and financial possessions. If this is what it means to have a degree, it's no wonder people strive hard to earn university degrees.

Amidst all this education frenzy, I wonder how many people who study for degrees are truly interested in becoming educated people in the true sense of the word. How many truly long to become cultured, morally aware, and virtuous people; to be people who do justice to the original purpose of what we call "education" today. I remember having met some very elderly people who had no formal education to speak of, but who lived their lives with a keen awareness of issues that matter. They were, in my estimation, educated.

Just because one is able to present logically coherent arguments doesn't mean that one has become a better person. How sobering it is to know that one can be embarking on a frantic pursuit for university degrees and yet remain thoroughly uneducated and culturally illiterate.

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He approaches the stage with a dazzling white tuxedo, his right wrist adorned with a thick gold bangle and his left wrist a thousand-dollar watch from the ostentatious store in town that many do not care to step into. His hair is set by the famed hair-salon that many can only so much as dream of patronising. His shoes are made of shiny brown leather that’s brought in from a foreign European country. He stands at the pulpit with the humungous bible before him that has its corners lined in gold. And he begins preaching. He talks about Jesus to the crowd of thousands.

His white unwashed robe is the only thing he carries around with him. He has no money, no credit card and no official documents. He owns no home save for the one which he has left behind. He lodges around. He speaks to small and large crowds, but has no public address system to support his voice projection. He stands on rocks and boats to speak, for he has no pulpits from which to speak. He stands in his sandals, feet covered with sand and dirt. His face is buried in the flying dust of the desert. He speaks to the poor and the outcasts. He’s the Jesus the other guy talks about.

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There are many unforeseen factors in life that threaten to rob the stillness and tranquility from within you. They are unforeseeable and unfriendly. It takes more than a mere repression to protect one's self from being tossed around by the currents of these merciless momentums.

They pierce into the very core of your soul, that very place where you've usually had an assurance of rest and security. These things, they fiercely snatch away from you in a subtle but sure way. Before you realise it, the world of peace and serenity has been transformed into an internally uncontrollable storm.

You're not responsible for many of the things that take place in this world. But you are responsible for nurturing the peace within you. It is yours to find, to have and to hold, to cherish, and to keep. And to protect. Your motivation for finding peace is not merely to find true happiness in life, but also that you may be a transmitter of this peace into other lives. When you lose it, you have nothing to offer to a world that is in great need of peace.

When the pace and momentum of life is overwhelming, at some point, it's time for us to speak to the person within, "Peace, be still."

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What should I do? How should I do it? How do I know if I'm doing it right?

Today, we are products of how yesterday has moulded us and shaped us to form the persons we are. And today, we can only do the best with our lives in the best way we know how. Inasmuch as we would like to cling on to the idea that faith will see us through, we don't really know, do we? At times, we actually do feel like our life is one big speculative exercise. In religious terms, we call it "faith".

Sometimes, we spend too much of our time worrying about the future, we forget that how we live our lives today partially (and not in small measure) determines the future we beget. It's such a discipline of balance. Spend too much today, and you live poor tomorrow. Live too frugally today and ignore the needs of your neighbour, and you betray the poverty of you soul in the present itself. How much to give? How much to keep? Such are real questions we ask ourselves in the present.

In such a manner of groping, how do we know if God is all right with what we've done and how we've done things? Perhaps he has never bothered about how perfect we've lived our lives as much as about the attitude with which we've lived our lives. The motivations of the heart counts more than anything else.

Therefore, find yourself free from tormenting considerations that impose legalistic demands upon your life. Love God and love your neighbour, and do it in the best way you know how. You'll never be able to do it perfectly, but rejoice that your best is enough to please the heart of the Father.

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Amidst the noise and haste, there must be seasons of silence. Because silence is when the fact of unseen realities becomes apparent to the contemplative listener. The serenity of silence speaks slowly but surely into the fragile soul of the saint in solitude.

When one has become too acquainted with bustling noise and corporate gatherings resounding with loud embelishments, silence seems like an awkward virtue. It seems to have crept in like an unexpected visitor. And when silence sits in the same space as we do, it feels uneasy. Perhaps because silence reveals the unsettledness of our souls in its raw form and confronts us with the painful state of what we might have become.

We must no longer instrumentalise hollow conversations as a facade from our fear of silence. One must grow into an embrace of silence. Because silence is much needed in today's world for the nourishment of one's being. Those who try to escape the caressing serenity of silence end up drowning the vitality of the soul in the sea of vain noises. And even when they do speak, the folly of shallowness is telling in their words.

One thing is for sure: If we escape silence today, we will ultimately still be confronted by it. For when the frail body expires and is ready to return to the ground from whence it came, the season of silence befalls.

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The church exists for me. Yes, that's what I said. The church exists for me. It exists to help draw me closer to God. It exists to help me experience God the way I feel most comfortable experiencing him. It exists to talk about God in a way that engages me. Otherwise, I have every legitimate reason to not be a part of the church, and I'm not to be blamed for it. Hey, it's not my fault that some of these churches are just plain... well... plain.

I must admit that I love those churches with cozy corners. They have like the coolest way of making sure that you feel at home and don't get lost in the crowd, unlike those "cold" churches that make God seem almost a million miles away. In these warm churches, you get to do stuff that really gets you in the mood, ya know what I mean? It's like I get to say anything I want anyway I want to without being judged. And these churches don't say stuff that sound so threatening, like "The Christian life is a life of commitment" or "Surrender your life to Jesus." Churches that say these things really drive me insane. Can't they just chill?!

Who ever said I needed to be in the church anyway. I've always had survival instincts, and can live a vital life as a loitering Christian, finding my own way around. It's more exciting visiting the different "communities" around and getting acquainted with the myriad of churches and their different styles, although no single one appeals to me in totality. But at the end of the day, I get a pretty interesting feel of the way things are done in the church, and I get to choose any church I want to attend on a particular Sunday. Heck, if I feel like it, I'll even attend two services a day! I guess this will go on until I meet a church that gives me a reason that's compelling enough for me to stay, like for example, having people whom I just wanna hang out with all the time. Or meeting a bunch of people who know the right thing to say when I most need to hear it.

You think what I'm doing is wrong? What's your benchmark for "rightness" and "wrongness" anyway? Hey, you've not lived my life before, what d'you know about me? Next to nothing. So turn and walk away, and don't judge! The truth is, you're just as crappy as I am even though you're a churchy creature. Just that you're more of a hypocrite than I am. I make no pretences; my life is a big mess, all right? But so's yours.

The truth is, you have no idea what I've been through. I used to be the kind of Christian like you are. I gave my whole heart and soul to the church and thought that this was the best way to be a Christian. I thought it pleased God. But things took a turn when that crappy pastor allowed those things to happen, and that really turned me off. You'll never believe how disillusioned I was with church after that. These people can't really be trusted. You really think they'll be there for you when you need them? Oh cummon.

So yeah, I'll visit your church, but don't expect me to turn up every Sunday or give you my whole heart or any stuff of that sort. Just let me be. When I'm ready, I'll come back. But I'm not saying that I'll definitely be ready anytime soon. Or at all. Basically, stop breathing down my neck and get off my back. Stop bugging me okay? I believe in God, and I believe that's enough. Who are you to judge anyway.

Oh, by the way, have I told you... my life is all about me.

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I believe absolutes exist, but I don't believe in absolutism. And I believe relativities exist, but I don't believe in relativism. And I believe different people believe differently about what is absolute and what is relative. It doesn't mean that there isn't anything absolute; it simply means that our understanding of what is absolute may not be as absolute as we think it is and may be more relative than we care to acknowledge pertaining to relativities in life.

For some people, it doesn't sound like I know what I'm sure about, but that's fine with me. Because the truth is, the mess I find myself in very much reflects the realities of life and faith. I've spent most of my faith journey guessing about what is and struggling with what should be. Even at times when I thought I'd already understood it, I later embarassed myself by acknowledging that I could hang on to what I thought I'd understood only if I insulated myself from variables that were my prerogative to ignore. The more I know, the more I realise I don't know.

So do I actually know anything? Yes. I know that I don't know everything. Of course, it doesn't mean that I don't know anything. It's simply that what I think I know is simply a reflection of the greater whole; it may not necessarily be untrue, but it's certainly incomplete and inexhaustive.

What do I think of people who think they can and have made sense of everything? I'm inclined to think that they do what I did - ignore some variables that possess the abilities to mess up what they think they know. But I'd like to think that I'm generous enough to respect others' needs for security in terms of what they can be sure of, even if I can't personally be sure of the same thing they're sure of.

This has merely taught me to be humbly generous. It has been a challenging journey, and I don't think I'm quite there yet. The challenge that stands before me now is to embody kind generosity by respecting even the less generous. For if I insist that the less generous have to be as generous as I'd like to think I am, that wouldn't be very generous... would it?

Posted by SK at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

This series, Telling Tales, represents my journey from being a well-honed theological student raised in a strictly evangelical paradigm of life and faith to being a more critical thinker and communicator of the story of my life and faith.

I wish to end this series in a way that does not impose the reality of my journey upon anyone else. It is not something to be universalised. I think the present intellectual climate tends to universalise too much, and often, unnecessarily. I seek to avoid that in the communication of this change that has taken place in my understanding.

I am not denying the benefits of my evangelical upbringing. Neither am I reacting with disdain towards the prevalence of the intellectual climate within the Christian tradition I have grown up in. I understand that it is precisely such an intellectual unbringing that has enabled me to critically examine and acknowledge its own limitations. Perhaps I am simply seeking a better way to view my faith. And my life.

Finally, I do not desire to engage in open challenges and debates with my friends who may have settled on the position of primacy in the role of expository preaching. I understand that there are wonderful and effective expository preachers out there, and they have blessed many Christians. Just not me. My life was radically changed when I discovered the power of the story.

But if you, like me, are wondering what is still missing in your passion for the word, then I wish to invite you to embark on a journey of unlearning what you have been comfortable with for years, and relearning the story of God. Your story. Eventually, you will no longer find a need to quote chapters and verses. You will simply tell the story as it is, knowing that the significance of your story has been found in the greater story of God. You will tell tales. You will be a storyteller.

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To be sure, the thought of storytelling invokes the disdain of many expository-minded Christians who think that this is the only one best way to know God’s word. They are able to tolerate – maybe even appreciate – very brief stories that illuminate sophisticated articulations, but not the telling of stories as entire sermons in themselves. Embracing the simplicity of stories that seek to drive messages without confounding complications is “Sunday School stuff”, they say.

But I have decided that this isn’t the way I want to communicate the story. I want to communicate the story in a way that makes a little child sit in my arms and an elderly man hang around me, simultaneously, both listening to the same story and identifying with the message of the story.

Some will say that this makes a sermon shallow. It has “no standard” (local expression, meaning “lacking in quality”), they claim. They crave profundity, for profoundly abstract thoughts are what determine the depth of a Christian. What a presumptuous assumption! Besides, one should never confuse complication for profundity. Profound depth can be communicated in the simplest of ways.

I have begun to draw away from the paradigm of expository preaching that I so highly exalted since having gone through vigorous theological training. I now gravitate towards the art of telling stories. Rather than being known by the literati as a keen expositor of the word, I want to be known by the simple-minded listeners as the man who tells tales. But of course, if expository preaching is your cup of tea, I’ll keep cheering you on. As for myself, I’ll keep “telling tales.”

Posted by SK at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m glad that many of my Pentecostal-Charismatic friends have not lost that tradition of storytelling. Whilst there are some who tell stories that are less than beneficial, I find that the tradition generally has done well to preserve the power of a story. Perhaps we can seek to learn from them once again how to tell stories.

In fact, I’m wondering if this is perhaps a main reason for our mainline denominations’ inclination to proclaim a gospel that befits the middle-class mind, thereby marginalising those who are intellectually less keen and cerebrally less inclined. The Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition has shown itself to have reached a world beyond the zones of evangelistic comfort. Much of this has been done through the telling of the story that is understood by even the simplest of minds.

Of course, one may say that the anti-intellectual inclination of the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition and its emphasis on the experiential are the very things that have caused them to rely on the art of storytelling. There may be mileage in this argument, but it is a different concern all together. The point to be noted herein is that they have captured the art of storytelling, and it is something the rest of us need to recover.

Expository preaching seems to assume that we can capture with almost absolute accuracy and almost in totality the messages of the biblical authors. How is that possible if the methodology itself was born of a modern system of thought and is fraught with modern presuppositions?

Proponents of expository preaching often criticise storytellers’ sermon as not being “biblical” enough, not being “word-based” enough, and not “expounding the word of God” enough. Underlying such criticism is the unobserved presupposition that the only way to communicate the word most powerfully is through a series of suggestively propositional sermons. But the bible itself is a story, isn’t it?

Posted by SK at 6:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

His early followers - they were storytellers too. They went from town to town, city to city, just telling the story of their encounter with him. They simply related their experiences of having lived with him: what he said, what they talked about with him, who they discovered him to be in their encounter with him, and what they did to participate in his dreams.

Basically, they related everything about him that had engaged their senses throughout his time with them. In a way, you may say that they were living in a memory. But living in memories is all right if they are living memories, isn’t it? After all, it was a story they would never be able to forget for the rest of their lives. Hence, they just moved from place to place telling it like it was.

They had seen by now that in telling the story of their lives with Jesus, they were also telling a story of themselves. They were, in that sense, inviting others to come and find their places and significance in that great story too. I believe they learned from the Master that the best way to communicate a story is by telling the story as it is, over and over again. So they told a story like it was a story.

I’m afraid we have forgotten how to tell our story like it is a story. We have dissected our large, large story and confined it into a book consisting of chapters and verses. We no longer believe that stories contain the message. Instead, we believe in abstract articulations of the message, and we use stories only when they illuminate the message itself. Now we exalt the scientific hermeneutical method of “expository preaching.” The place of storytelling itself has become marginalised and it is now belittled as something lesser than expository preaching. We have forgotten that the story itself is the message.

Posted by SK at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

He was a storyteller. For he knew his listeners consisted not only of those who were thoroughly learned but also those who were accorded little or no privileges for formal education. But there was one way in which he could communicate such that both the learned and the illiterate would be able to grasp his message – stories. He believed in the power of stories. So he told them many stories about everything relevant to their lives. He used objects and roles that they could readily observe around them.

How they loved his stories. They would sit in humungous crowds, in the heat of the day, just to listen to him because all their lives nobody had ever told stories so powerfully. The strange thing was that his stories seemed to summon a kind of a hunger from within them that almost “obligated” them to desire to keep following him everywhere he went. They craved his stories.

Perhaps it was because these stories were stories of themselves. He was telling them stories about themselves. It was as if he was taking each and every one of those people in the multitudes and giving them beautiful roles in these stories he was telling. And they simply had to know how the next story was going to unfold, for in listening to these stories, they were also finding themselves. His stories satisfied a deep hunger they were experiencing.

The young and the old, they all loved him. Even the little children loved his stories. As he told them tales about life, he also asked them questions which they answered very well. They understood these stories, you see. Strangely, it was the learned people – the thoroughly educated and cognitively esteemed – who often failed to understand these stories the way they were meant to be understood. But these stories never failed to engage the “foolish”.

Posted by SK at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The gift of relationships is also a discipline of balance.

If we clench our fists too tightly to sustain a relationship, we inevitably kill it. We suffocate the life and vitality out of the relationship. We find people having to distance themselves from us just so they can survive mentally and emotionally. Eventually, the inclination to control and manipulate creeps in unbeknownst to us. The impulse to hold relationships in this manner speaks of an insecurity and an intense emptiness within ourselves. To cling on to such a relationship is unhealthy because "the other" is no longer an "other." "The other" now exists primarily to fulfill our deepest longings. Even in our giving, we seek to receive.

If we hold the relationship too loosely, it invariably slips into an exercise of convenience. We tend to offer of ourselves when we do not ourselves require that which we