Seed good and bad

A friend of mine recently told me his daughter just got hired as a stewardess in an international airline. She finished nursing, but at this time it seems one has to pay to get hired as a nurse in hospitals. Yes, it’s that bad!

To be a stewardess was an alternative, a kind of forced one. The family needs the money, and the starting rate told to her daughter was 70K. Who would not be happy with that kind of salary? But it comes with a stiff price too.

The father, who’s very protective of the apple of his eyes, has sharply conflicting feelings. He’s caught in the horns of a dilemma. He has heard many not so good items about girls in that kind of work.

I understand him perfectly. The girl is an eye candy, and she will surely attract attention. She has been bagging beauty titles since she was in grade school. But for all that, she remains level-headed, her feet firmly rooted on the ground and very responsible. She has been helpful to her siblings.

After so much painful deliberation, the father allowed her to accept the job, with a list of conditions. The girl, who has become like a niece to me, dutifully thanked her father, and promised to comply with them and to deliver.

My hunch is that she could hack it, not only professionally but also morally. I have observed her from a distance, and she seems to be a sensible girl, who knows what she has got and the accompanying advantages and dangers of her effortless charms.

But I join her family in deep prayers for her. The world is littered with tricks and traps. One has to be truly clever, with the cleverness of the serpent as the Gospel tells us, to survive, especially in that area that is most important—the spiritual and moral.

This is the challenge we have these days. There are good and bad elements around always, and one has to learn how to sail his boat safely. For this purpose, the need for continuing formation cannot be overemphasized.

Precisely at these times, when we are all exposed to plentier and subtler temptations, we need to be properly formed and ably supported by a strong and stable network of good family-Church-society environment.
Another friend who manages a call center also told me about some not-so-good observations he has of the people in that kind of work. These are usually young people who get good pay but who really have to work hard.

It’s a combination that can be highly combustible in the spiritual and moral sense. These young ones tend to overspend, abuse their new status, seek compensation in some dangerous pursuits, and sooner or later get into trouble.

This friend of mine, who has to handle many of the problematic cases, strongly feels that these young people should be given continuing formation. They need to be truly grounded and properly oriented.

As chaplain of a technical school whose graduates often work in these call centers and other similar outfits, I always feel the need to continually invite the alumni for some means of formation—retreats, recollections, doctrine classes, and personal spiritual direction and confession.

Like a father to them, I get to tell them things straight to their faces—even telling them to take their haircut, change their clothes, observe physical, mental and spiritual hygiene, live order and poverty, modesty and purity, and pray, etc.

These details should be attended to assiduously, since they have the tendency to be set aside, ignored and forgotten. And these reminders should be done as well by the companies, families and society in general. They should not be the exclusive tasks of priests. Everyone can and should help.

We are facing a new world speeding in developments, such that we can hardly cope with them. Sometimes I get the feeling we don’t know anymore what’s hitting us.

We, of course, should be open to the world, but should be quick also to discern and identify good and bad seeds, and flexible enough to flow with the times.

We have to have a kind of black box that records developments in a certain period, and examine it from time to time to study what went right, what went wrong, and how we could avoid dangers.