Peace amid worldly tribulations

THE readings of the Mass on Tuesday of the 5th Week of Easter (cfr. Acts 14,19-28; Jn 14,27-31) happily show us that we can have peace even amid the most terrible predicaments in our earthly life as long as we follow Christ. 

 In the first reading, we see Paul and some of his followers proceeding to do a lot of preaching in many places, converting many people to Christianity, and establishing Christian communities in these places despite some severe persecutions they had to go through. Though he suffered a lot, he certainly enjoyed peace. Otherwise, he would not do what he did. 

 In the gospel, we are told that it is Christ who gives us the true peace, a peace that the world cannot give. It is a different kind of peace which is not simply a matter of not having any worries, problems and the like. It’s a peace that only God can give, a peace that can handle any kind of conditions and situations that we can be in. 

 We have to understand that peace, like anything else that is of true value to mankind, can only come from God who gives it to us through Christ, the Son of God who became man to save us from our sin and our doom. Peace, which characterized the life of our first parents before the fall and thus they enjoyed it effortlessly, can only be attained by us now after some struggle, following Christ’s example. 

 That is why it can only be had if we get it from Christ our Redeemer, who won it for us through the cross. He himself said so. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (Jn 14,27) 

 There, we have in a nutshell where to look for it if we want true peace. It’s not a peace that comes as a result of some human effort alone. It has to come from Christ who actually gives it to us abundantly, but which we have to receive and keep faithfully. The problem is that we often mess it up, and follow our own version of peace. 

 In that famous Latin line about peace, “Opus iustitiae pax” (Peace is the work of justice), a major distortion is made because justice is understood mainly as human justice, relying simply on our legal and judicial systems, our culture and other social norms. 

 It’s an understanding that does not go far and deep enough to reach its true source who is God as revealed to us in full by Christ. It simply depends on our human consensus which can go in any which way, depending on the changing circumstances. 

 And so, with the foundation of peace and justice unclear or mainly rooted on shaky grounds, true peace and justice will remain elusive, and can even produce the opposite effects while pursued under their name. It’s truly ironic! 

 Thus, in the psalms, we can read the following: “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with you, which frames mischief by a law?” (94,20) Christ himself also warned us about this: “A time is coming when the one who kills you will think he is serving God.” (Jn 16,2) 

 We need to be truly identified with Christ to have peace in ourselves and in everybody else all over the world. It is a peace that comes as a result of reconciliation. It therefore involves repentance, conversion, struggle, that Christ has shown to us by embracing the cross and dying on it.

Blending humility with magnanimity and magnificence

WE have to be clear about the intimate relation between the virtues of humility, magnanimity and magnificence. Often these virtues are understood as somehow opposed to each other. 

 Humility is often understood as projecting a low profile, hidden, passive and kind of indifferent to the things around, especially the big, raging issues of the times. While magnanimity and magnificence are regarded as being showy, ostentatious, intrusive, extravagant, etc. 

 This need not be the case. If they are understood well and are based on the real foundation of what is good, these virtues actually have an intimate and mutual relation. Unless one is humble, he can hardly be magnanimous and capable of doing big things. And one can truly be magnanimous and magnificent if first of all he is humble. They always go together. 

 And the key to blending them together is to follow Christ who, as the gospel reading for the Mass of Monday of the 5th Week of Easter tells us, said, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” (Jn 14,21) 

 And what did Christ reveal to us that would show us the close relationship between humility, on the one hand, and magnanimity and magnificence, on the other? It is this: that He being God made himself man and went all the way to offer his life for all our sins. There is no greater humility than this! 

 And because of that, he carried out the most magnanimous and magnificent enterprise for all time: the salvation of mankind. There can be no greater magnanimity and magnificence than that! 

 With Christ, the greatness of God is lived in the ordinary things of life as shown in his hidden life. He was known to be a carpenter. And even during his public life, he made it clear that he was there to serve and not to be served. 

 He even went to the extent of washing the feet of the apostles at the Last Supper. And when some people wanted to carry him on their shoulders out of their immense admiration for him, he eluded them. He also rode on a donkey instead of some throne on his way to his supreme act of love for us—his death on the cross! 

 And yet that greatness is not limited in that level of the ordinary and the hidden. Once he started his public life, Christ went around many places preaching and performing miracles, clarifying and correcting things despite severe opposition by some parties, until he completed his mission by offering his life on the cross to conquer sin and death and gain our redemption. 

 We need to train ourselves to have the very mind and spirit of Christ to be able to blend these virtues of humility, magnanimity and magnificence. This, of course, is going to be a tricky thing, given our erratic human condition. But that’s the challenge we have to face. And we can feel confident that we can hack it because God will always give us his grace if we also do our part. 

 Let’s see to it that our humility does not prevent us from doing great and heroic things. And that our magnanimity and magnificence should spring from the humble recognition that everything comes from God, and not just from ourselves!

God needs to prune us

THE gospel reading for the Mass on the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B, talks about Christ telling his disciples that he is the true vine and God is the vine grower. Every branch that does not bear fruit, he said, would be taken away by God, and the branch that does would be pruned for it to bear more fruit. (cfr. Jn 15,1-8) 

 It’s quite clear from these words of Christ that we really need to be fruitful and productive in our life, not so much in terms of material and temporal gains as in terms of the real fruit that we need to bear: our sanctification, our identification with God who created us in his image and likeness, and who is testing us in this life if what he wants us to be is also what we would like ourselves to be. 

 In short, it’s a matter of whether we choose to follow God’s will or simply our own will! 

 We need to realize that our life is first of all a “project” of God before it is our own. He is the one who started it and who wants it to go along the way of his plans and designs. Ours is simply to correspond to his will as best that we can. This is what is meant by being fruitful in our life. 

 We have to be wary when we fail to bear the fruit God is expecting from us, because according to Christ’s words, God will cut us off from the true vine, Christ himself who as the true vine, offers us “the way, the truth and the life” proper to us. 

 We actually have no excuse why we cannot follow God’s will. That’s because Christ, the God who became man, has offered us and continues to offer us everything we need to achieve our true purpose in life. 

 This realization should urge us to make Christ truly the center of our life. He should be everything to us. Any moment or any aspect of our life where Christ is set aside should be considered as an anomaly in our life. 

 But given our tendency to say enough to whatever effort we make to follow God’s will, we should not be surprised that we experience some kind of “pruning” that God does on us to make us more fruitful and to continue doing good. 

 This pruning can take many forms—more challenges and trials in our life, some problems and crises that we are made to experience, etc. All these are meant to make us a better person, polishing the rough edges in our personality so we can become more and more like Christ, humble and willing take on anything for the glory of God and for the good of mankind. 

 This pruning is meant to develop more virtues, more skills, or to grow more in them. We are quite notorious to saying enough to what we already have accomplished. But we have to realize that the pursuit for the fullness of our humanity will never have any limit. God will be the one to complete and perfect things. Ours is simply to continue going as far as we can, without stopping or saying enough. 

 We should not be surprised, much less complain, when we notice that God continues to prune us in different ways. It can only mean that we are being made to become more and more like him which is the real fruitfulness meant for us!

Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” for us

THE readings of the Mass on Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter (cfr. Act 13,26-33; Jn 14,1-6) remind us of our duty to really know who Christ is since he is the very pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity. How he is is also how we should be. And given our journeying condition here on earth, Christ offers us “the way, the truth and the life” proper to us. 

 We have to realize very deeply and abidingly that we all have the need to know Christ well. This need involves not only a few of us. It involves all of us. And so, we just have to see how we can go through these theological sciences of Christology (Christ as the Son of God made man) and Soteriology (Christ as our savior), which can be done both formally and informally. 

 As the gospels narrate in many occasions, in spite of all the miracles and the wonderful teachings he gave them, many of the people continued to be doubtful and even suspicious of him. On several occasions, they even tried to harm and eliminate him. Of course, in the end they got their way. They managed to put Christ to death in the most ignominious way to die, i.e., to be crucified. 

 It is a phenomenon that continues to take place today, in spite of the most convincing of all the miracles of Christ—his own resurrection that later led to his ascension into heaven that was witnessed by a good number of people. 

 That many of us continue to doubt and even to be suspicious of him can be seen in the fact that we continue to take him for granted, to put him aside from our daily affairs as if he is irrelevant or just a drag to our activities and concerns, and even to openly reject and to be hostile to him. 

 We need to correct this predicament immediately and strongly, otherwise we would be fully cut off from the very source and keeper of our humanity. There are many ways to resolve this problem. We obviously cannot cover all of them, but we can at least mention a few. 

 One way is to disabuse ourselves from banking our belief in Christ mainly on some tremendous miracles and extraordinary events. That would be like testing or doubting God always. We should believe in Christ, with or without miracles. 

 Christ himself complained about this. “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe,” he said to a court official whose daughter was dying. (Jn 4,48) We should avoid having some ulterior motives before we confess our belief in Christ. 

 We need to strengthen our belief in Christ by undertaking the relevant study of his person and mission, and by submitting ourselves to a certain plan that would make our personal and collective relation with Christ alive. 

 We certainly have to learn how to pray, how to offer sacrifices. We have to develop virtues that would resemble us little by little with him. We need to avail of the sacraments where God’s grace, his way of sharing his life with us, is channeled to us. We have to learn to wage a lifelong ascetical struggle since we will always be hounded by the enemies of God and of our own soul, starting with our own weaknesses, etc.

“Ite, missa est”

THAT’S “Go forth, the Mass is ended” in Latin. With these words, we are reminded that all of us who attend Mass are being sent forth the way Christ sent his apostles to “go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” (Mk 16,15) 

 May it be that we are always aware of this mandate Christ is giving us. We are being sent to go as far and as widely as possible to proclaim the Gospel. We are being sent to make Christ known and loved by as many people as possible, because Christ is actually everything to us. 

 To be sent by Christ to proclaim him in all corners of the world is for us to be a missionary. But we need to make some drastic updating of our understanding of what a missionary is. We should not get stuck with the common textbook idea that a missionary is usually a priest or nun who goes to a far-away place, and literally starts a settlement there. 

 While this concept of a missionary is still valid—it will always be—it now cries to be expanded to reflect its true character, especially given today’s fast-moving and more complicated world. 

 We have to understand that everyone, by virtue of his sheer humanity and much more, his Christianity, is called to be a missionary, and that he does not need to go to distant lands because his immediate environment already needs a more effective, down-to-earth evangelization. 

 Yes, even the ordinary guy in an office, the farmer, the businessman, the politician, the entertainers, artists and athletes, are called to be missionaries. That’s simply because as persons with a prominently social dimension in our life, we have to be responsible for one another. 

 And the biggest responsibility we can have for the others would be their moral and spiritual welfare, much more than just their economic or social wellbeing. It is this responsibility that we have to learn how to be more serious about and more competent in fulfilling. This is the current situation and challenge to all of us. 

 And so, we have to reconcile ourselves with the reality that we actually have to be missionaries right where we are. In fact, I would say that to go to the deserts of Africa or the forests and rivers of Brazil could be far easier to do, since in these places we only have to contend more with physical and material difficulties. 

 The people in these isolated areas may exhibit primitive violent attitudes, but their minds and hearts can easily be converted by simple and elemental gestures of goodness and, of course, the grace of God. This has always been the experience of missionaries who went to these places. 

 It’s rather in the paved jungles of the big cities inhabited by very sophisticated people immersed in very worldly things where the more demanding kind of missionary work is needed. 

 In these places, the people tend to be so confined to their own world, already made beautiful and comfortable by the new technologies, such that any talk about spiritual and supernatural realities, especially about prayer, sacrifice and the need for the sacraments, could easily fall on deaf ears. 

 These urban dwellers may not openly profess atheism or agnosticism. They can even show many acts of piety, and can even show off some good work. And this is the more difficult part, precisely because with that condition they can think they are already ok insofar as religion is concerned. 

 We need to sharpen our sense of our missionary identity to face the tremendous challenge we have today to make Christ known and loved.

Some notes on preaching God’s word

THE readings of the Mass on Wednesday of the 4th Week of Easter (cfr. Acts 12,24-13,5; Jn 12,44-50) somehow remind us of the need to spread the word of God, which is another way of saying that we have to make God not only known but also loved and pursued to such an extent that we truly become children of his, sharers of his life and nature, as God wants us to be. 

 In the first reading, we see how the early disciples of Christ started to go around to preach about Christ. In the responsorial psalm, we are made to realize that we have to the desire to let God be praised by all the nations. And in the gospel, Christ made it clear that he was and is the one who will lead us to God. In other words, he is the very Word of God. We need to listen to him, follow him and, in fact, identify ourselves with him. 

 Toward this end we need to realize that in making Christ known and loved, we have to transmit as faithfully as possible this very Word of God. This can be done in many ways, but an important way is that of preaching God’s Word. 

 Preaching the Word of God is a task entrusted to his apostles and shared by all of us in different ways. The clergy, of course, takes a leading role in this affair. It’s a serious business that involves our whole being, and not just our talents and powers. 

 First, we need to examine our understanding and attitude toward God’s word, especially the Gospel. On this basic understanding would depend what we do with the Gospel and how we handle it. 

 Do we really know the true nature of the Gospel? Or do we take it as just one more book, perhaps with certain importance, but definitely not as the living word of God, in spite of its human dimensions? 

 The Gospel is actually the proclamation of Christ as the Emmanuel, that is, God with us. This is an on-going affair that did not stop with the death of Christ. Christ lives with us up to now, and continues to do things with us. 

 All these affirmations are captured in the last lines of the Gospel of St. Matthew where our Lord said: 

 “Go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (28,19-20) 

 We need to see to it that in preaching God’s word, while we have to adapt it to the way and the conditions of the people, we truly manage to transmit Christ’s true message to us. In this regard, we have to realize that Christ’s true message, while full of love and tenderness, will always involve suffering and sacrifice. He even spelled it out clearly when he said that if we want to follow him, we need to deny ourselves and carry the cross. 

 We have to be wary of just making feel-good memes and messages while neglecting the indispensable role of suffering and sacrifice in our life. When we preach, let’s find a way, guided always by our faith, of making suffering and sacrifice attractive to everyone. 

 And that can only take place if we know how to relate our unavoidable suffering and sacrifices to the redemptive passion, death and resurrection of Christ. We have to encourage everyone to have a theological and Christ-like attitude to any suffering and sacrifice we have to make in this life.

When we fail to practice what we preach

WE should not be too surprised and bothered by this phenomenon. Given our human limitations and weaknesses, this predicament can take place anytime and often. What we need to do is to go immediately to God, ask for pardon and the grace to begin again. Our failures should not alienate us from God and from the others. Rather, it should humble us and urge us to go to God and to begin again. 

 It’s true that we should try our best to be very consistent with what we preach. But given our wounded human condition, we cannot expect that everything will be consistent in our life. There are just too many things to contend with in our life that to be consistent all the time is next to impossible. 

 In trying, for example, to uphold and defend our Christian faith, we may have to refrain from insisting on it if, out of charity and prudence, those with whom we are dealing are not yet ready to hear about our Christian faith. We can appear to be inconsistent with our faith, at least, for a period of time. But we purposely do it if only to gradually lead others to our Christian faith. 

 But there are also times when out of human weakness, we fail to practice what we preach. This may be due to our laziness or a mistaken notion of prudence, etc., but we should not get stuck feeling bad for long or, worse, discouraged. 

 Failures and inconsistencies do happen in our lives. They can happen everyday, and even many times during the day. They may not be big failures. They are usually small ones. But they are somehow like a constant feature of our life. We should not anymore be surprised by this fact of life, and much less, held captive by them. 

 We should know how to handle them. Not only that, we should know how we can derive some good from them. That’s because our failures can actually channel great things for us. They can be a blessing in disguise. 

 In this life, we are supposed to be clever as serpents while remaining simple as doves. (cfr. Mt 10,16) That’s the advice Christ gave his disciples in dealing with the drama of life. And this advice can be more concretely specified by developing in us that skill of knowing how to let go and to move on when we suffer failures. 

 We should not forget that there are many other more pleasant possibilities than getting stuck with our failures. As one saint would put it, when one door closes, another door opens. In life, there are actually many doors that we can open. God provides us with countless possibilities to recover. 

 If we have the proper attitude, if we are with God, we would know that our life possesses an infinity of possibilities. We always have to remember that God is always on top of things. Nothing happens outside of his providence no matter how messy things can get in our life. There’s a time for everything, we are told. (cfr. Ecclesiastes 3,1-8) This should always be in our mind so that we do not overreact when failures come. 

 What we ought to do is to go immediately to God and to refer things to him. He will be the one to reassure us that everything will just be fine. Nothing happens without him knowing and allowing it to happen. And if he allows it to happen, it is because there is a greater good that can be derived from it. In God’s math, the gains far outweigh the losses.

Always listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit

WE have to continually listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit who always intervenes in our life. And that’s because it is actually the Holy Spirit, more than us, who shapes and directs our life, who deepens, widens, if not purifies and corrects our understanding of things. 

 This truth of our Christian faith is brought out in that episode in the Acts of the Apostles where St. Peter was made to understand that he was not only meant to work on the Jews, but also on the Gentiles. (cfr. Acts 11,1-18) 

 We have to be wary that we already know everything and that we are already doing things right because we have studied our faith and have been religiously following a plan of life consisting of many practices of piety, like daily prayers, recourse to the sacraments, etc. That would easily make us fall into a certain state of self-righteousness that would blind us from what God in the Holy Spirit would actually show us. 

 Let’s always remember that authentic Christian life never puts limits in our concern and love for the others. No matter how undeserving the others may be, we should be willing to bear their errors, sins and offenses, even going to the extent, like Christ, to offer our lives. 

 For this, we always need the help of the Holy Spirit who actually is constantly intervening in our lives. We just have to train ourselves how to recognize his voice and follow it as promptly as possible. 

 Christ himself said it very clearly. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” (Jn 14,26) 

 We have to understand that the Holy Spirit perpetuates the presence and redemptive action of Christ all throughout time, with all the drama, vagaries, ups and downs that we men make in our earthly sojourn. 

 It has been prophesied that God will pour out his Spirit upon all men. The Holy Spirit is intended for all of us. We are all meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit. But this divine will obviously has to contend with the way we receive and do things, and that is, that we take to this reality in stages involving a whole range of human means of teaching, evangelizing, etc. 

 We need the Holy Spirit because only in him can we truly recognize Christ. Only in him will we be able to have Christ in our life, to remember all his words and even to develop them to adapt them to our current needs and situations. 

 Only in him can we see things properly. Especially these days when truth, justice and charity have become very slippery, and people are left confounded and vulnerable to fall into scepticism and cynicism, we need to be in the Holy Spirit to be able to sort things out properly and avoid the mess. 

 I am amused to note that in today’s political debates, a growing awareness is felt by more and more people that myths and lies, with shreds of truths and facts cleverly inserted, are exchanged. They talk about a surge of fake news. It’s not anymore about what the truth is. It’s more about who is followed more. 

 This is what happens when we are not in the Holy Spirit and we rely only on our human resources that sooner or later will be twisted and exploited to suit personal or partisan interests, and not anymore the common good.

To be truly Christian

TO be truly Christian, we should really have the very heart of Christ. We should have his attitude toward all possible conditions our life can find itself in, irrespective of whether these conditions are favorable to us or not. 

 This can mean that in spite of doing a lot of good, we can still be misunderstood, unappreciated, contradicted and rejected. And yet we should never succumb to hatred and condemning people. Like Christ we should be willing to offer our life even to those who do us evil, even offering forgiveness to them. We have to go that extent. 

 Like Christ, we should have the desire to save rather than to condemn those who are wrong morally and spiritually. Obviously, we can only have this kind of attitude when we truly identify ourselves with Christ. Absent this and relying solely on our human powers, we can only go so far. 

 In the readings of the Mass of the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B (cfr. Acts 4,8-12; 1 Jn 3,1-2; Jn 10,11-18) we are told about our tendency to rely only on our own powers, on our estimation of what is good, true and just. We forget what is said in the Responsorial Psalm of the Mass: “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” (Ps 118,22) 

 We need to see to it that our primordial duty as a person and as a child of God is to identify ourselves with Christ, who is the pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity, the very “way, truth and life” that is proper to us. We need to carry out this duty in everything that we do and that can happen to us. 

 That is why it indispensable that we really know Christ. Not only that. We have to love him, following his teachings and example. Let’s keep in mind these words of Christ: “Whoever is not with me is against me. Whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (Lk 11,23) With these words of Christ, it’s very clear that we are supposed to be so united with Christ, so identified with him, that he and us can be considered simply as one. 

 We need to process this truth of our faith about ourselves very slowly, because it will obviously astound us to think that we are supposed to be one with Christ. Who, me, one with Christ? We most likely would be tempted to say, tell it to the Marines! 

 But that’s just the naked truth about us, whether we like it or not. We cannot be any other if we just bother also to know why it is so. An expression that is relevant to this matter is ‘alter Christus,’ another Christ. And it’s worthwhile to know what it is all about. 

 We are supposed to be ‘alter Christus,’ the goal and ideal that is meant for us, though we need also to do our part, free beings as we are, to achieve that status. God, our Creator and Father, wants us to be that way, though he does not impose it on us without our consent that should also be shown with deeds and not just with intentions or words. 

 We are supposed to be ‘alter Christus’ simply because, if we have been created in the image and likeness of God, and Christ is the Son of God who is the perfect image and likeness that God has of himself, then we can only conclude that we have to be like Christ who is the very essence of love that is meant for us.

Developing a great love for the Eucharist

WE need time and effort to develop a great love for the Eucharist. More than that. We need to rev up our faith so we can truly take seriously these words of Christ that refer to the Eucharist: “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has everlasting life and I will raise him up on the last day.” (Jn 6,53-54) 

 We need to rekindle our Eucharistic amazement and to intensify our Eucharistic piety, since in the Eucharist we really have Christ with us and he offers himself as food for our earthly journey toward eternal life. 

 Obviously for this devotion to keep going and growing, we need to grow in faith also, a faith that should be expressed always in deeds of hope and charity. 

 If we truly have faith and love in the Holy Eucharist, if we are truly Eucharistic souls, then we cannot help but be intensely and abidingly apostolic souls as well. 

 In fact, we need to be most zealous in our apostolate, since it actually is a duty incumbent on all Christian believers to have and to keep burning all throughout their lives, making use of all the situations and circumstances we may find ourselves in. 

 Everytime we hear Mass, receive Holy Communion or visit the Blessed Sacrament, we should remember those final and most heart-felt words of Christ to his apostles: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation…” (Mk 16,15) 

 These words clearly indicate how Christ wants his work of redemption to continue. This time it will be carried out as a joint effort between him and us. While we are first of all the object of his redemptive work, we also become the subject of such work with him. 

 We also have to realize that we have in our hands a tremendous and delicate treasure that we need to take extreme care of. 

 Toward this end, we need to revive the proper understanding of the liturgy, and especially of the Holy Mass, and to reach that ideal of feeling that Eucharistic amazement that St. John Paul II talked about. 

 In an encyclical, the saintly Pope practically described the very essence of liturgy in these words: “In this gift Jesus entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery. With it he brought about a mysterious ‘oneness in time’ between that (Paschal) Triduum and the passage of the centuries.” (5) 

 In other words, in the liturgy, especially in the Holy Mass, we are made contemporaries with Christ in his supreme sacrifice of love for us on the cross and in his resurrection. Not only that, we are also made sharers of that supreme sacrifice! 

 If we just bother a little to consider this wonderful truth of our faith more thoughtfully, we could not help but be amazed at what we have in the Holy Eucharist! It is an amazement that is a result of a faith and love of God, and not of merely worldly marvels and instances of human exhilaration. 

 It is an amazement that first of all is spiritual and supernatural before it becomes human, emotional, psychological or physical. We need to fathom the spiritual and supernatural foundations of this marvel that is the Holy Eucharist in order to be truly amazed.

Christ gives himself to us completely

THAT’S what we can gather from what Christ said about himself being the Bread of Life. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eats of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.” (Jn 6,51) 

 This gives us a great reason to be truly happy and confident in our life which will always be marked with all sorts of challenges, trials, difficulties, etc. Christ wants to give himself completely to us so he and us can be one as we should, since we are God’s image and likeness, despite our weaknesses, limitations and sins. 

 We need to process this truth of our faith thoroughly and try our best to receive Christ as the Bread of Life in Holy Communion as worthily and frequently as possible. We need to enliven our belief that in Christ we have everything, we have what is truly and ultimately needed by us. Many of our needs are passing, are of a temporal nature. It is Christ who we truly and ultimately need. 

 And he gives himself so completely to us as to make himself bread to be eaten by us. Although he is like air since we cannot truly live without him, he compares and makes himself bread, because unlike air, he as bread has to be deliberately sought. 

 This duty of seeking him is what we have to be more aware of. In the Gospel itself, we hear our Lord saying, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” (Mt 6,33) Not only that, we should also spread this most wonderful truth as widely as possible. 

 In the first reading of the Mass on Thursday of the Third Week of Easter (cfr. Acts 8,26-40), we are told about the Apostle Philip who preached about Christ to an Ethiopian eunuch, giving us an example of how eager we should be to make Christ known, loved and received by as many people as possible. 

 Christ as the Bread of Life means that he is truly and really with us even while he sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. We are not left only with some picture or souvenir or symbol of his. And he accompanies us in our earthly sojourn, giving us the ultimate means we need to tackle whatever we may encounter in this life. 

 It’s a madness of love to which we have to correspond as best that we can. God himself gives us the grace in abundance to enable us to correspond to that love. We should not be scared of the tremendous prospect before us. But it’s up to us if we choose to love him or not. We should do everything to make use of what God is making available to us. 

 We are told that if we are generous with God, God will even be more generous with us, for he cannot be outdone in generosity. He assures us that whatever little we give to him will always yield us a hundredfold. It’s always good to keep this divine assurance in mind. 

 We have to learn to subordinate our earthly and temporal concerns and plans to the task of seeking Christ. We have to be wary of being influenced mainly if not solely by the standards of practicality, convenience and other worldly values. That’s our problem. God is often left behind in the play of our competing interests.

Despite contradictions, just do a lot of good

THAT’S what we can gather from the readings of the Mass on Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter. (Acts 8,1-8; Jn 6,35-40) Whatever negative things we can encounter along the way, the good, which is a matter of believing in Christ, if not, identifying ourselves with him, will always prevail, if not soon, then in the end. 

 It’s amazing to note that, as narrated in the first reading, the still-unconverted Paul was one of the fiercest persecutors of the early Christians. And yet, later on, he became a most intense apostle. 

 Miracles indeed can happen. Extraordinary change of heart can take place. We have to be careful not to make some rash judgments, or if that cannot be avoided as a spontaneous reaction, we should also be quick to rectify ourselves. We should just focus on doing a lot of good even if we are misunderstood or misjudged. 

 Yes, we just have to learn how, with Christ, we can overcome and drown evil with an abundance of good. This is a very intriguing part of our Christian faith. Not only should we love our enemies, as Christ taught us, but we also need to drown evil with an abundance of good. This was specifically articulated by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans where he said: 

 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Rom 12,17-20) 

 We have to try our best to erase whatever disbelief, doubt or skepticism we can have as we consider this teaching, since most likely, our first and spontaneous reaction to it would precisely be those conditions. We can ask, even if done only interiorly, “Is Christ really serious about this? Can this thing that Christ and St. Paul are telling us, possible, let alone, doable?” 

 When these reactions come to us, it is time to remind ourselves that we just have to follow our faith that definitely contains a lot of mysteries and things supernatural that we are not expected to understand fully. Like Our Lady and all the saints, we should just believe and do what we are told because it is Christ who said so, and because it is the Church that teaches us so. 

 That’s what faith is all about. By believing first, then we can start to understand things that are hard to explain or articulate in human terms. As they say, that’s how the ball bounces. We should not waste time trying to understand everything at once or at the beginning. Let’s be game enough to go through some kind of adventure that, no matter how the outcome would be, we know that God is in control of everything. 

 In the meantime, guided by our faith, let’s begin to develop the appropriate attitudes, practices, habits and virtues. We have to learn the intricacies of charity, like being patient, magnanimous, compassionate and understanding, merciful, always friendly with everyone even if not everyone is friendly with us. We should be willing to suffer for the others and to bear their burdens.

Staying on course

WE have to learn the art of how to stay on course in our life so that we do not get distracted, confused, entangled and lost. For this, we have to be clear about what the real and ultimate purpose of our life is, as well as know how to relate everything in our life—both the good things and the bad—to this purpose. 

 This, of course, would require us to undertake regular review and updating of our plans and strategies through practices like daily examinations of conscience, monthly days of recollection, annual retreats, etc. And even during the day, we should make a number of pit stops to see if we are still on course or are already getting deviated from the proper way. 

 We should always keep sharp our awareness that our life is actually something like a journey where we are expected to make daily progress on our way to our ultimate home or destination, which is to be with God in heaven. Yes, we have to realize deeply and abidingly that our life here on earth is also like a test God gives us, to see if what he wants us to be is also what we ourselves would like to be. 

 We are somehow reminded of this need of ours in the gospel of the Mass on Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter. (Jn 6,30-35) “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst,” Christ told a crowd of people, somehow telling us also that it should be Christ who should be the object of our real hunger and thirst. 

 Thus, we have to realize that we need to educate our biological or bodily functions, insofar as possible, such that they acquire a theological meaning and purpose and not just purely biological functions. 

 If we are truly serious in our Christian duty to make ourselves “another Christ” who is the pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our damaged humanity, then the Christian transformation of our own selves should not only involve our spiritual faculties—our intelligence and will—but also our biological or bodily powers. 

 Thus, when we experience hunger for food or thirst for some drink, it should not just be food and drink that we should be interested in. We should not remain in the level of the material aspect of our life. Our hunger and thirst should also lead us to God. 

 For this to take place, we certainly need a kind of plan or program to keep our spiritual life alive and vibrant even as we go through the drudgery of the routine things or the excitement of new and challenging things. 

 We need to realize more seriously that more than feeding our body, we actually need to feed our soul which, being the principle of our life, is more important than the body. We are not just a biological being, like the plants and animals. We are human beings, persons with a rational nature and animated by a spiritual soul. 

 We need to discipline ourselves to follow a certain plan that would help us keep alive our awareness of our need to make Christ the constant focus and goal of our life. This would mean that we learn how to be in contemplative mode even as we immerse ourselves in our earthly affairs. 

 This is the way to properly stay on course in life!

Keeping our focus on God always strong

IN the gospel of the Mass on Monday of the Third Week of Easter (cfr. Jn 6, 22-29), we are told about how more and more people, after learning about how Christ managed to feed 5 thousand people with a few loaves of bread, came looking for Christ. They were even willing to cross the water in boats just to find him. 

 This reaction of the people should also be our reaction to Christ. We should try our best to develop and keep our attraction to Christ as strong and abiding as possible. We have to convince ourselves that this is the ideal condition for us to be in, and thus, we have to be wary of the constant danger of being drawn and trapped in our earthly affairs only, with Christ regarded only peripherally, if at all. 

 For this, we first of all should ask for God’s grace which is actually given to us in abundance. And from there, let’s go through some systematic plan of life that will nourish and strengthen our constant and intimate relationship with God, a relationship that should involve our entire self—body and soul, feelings, emotions and passions down to our very instincts, as well as our mind and heart. 

 It should be a plan that should obviously include prayer in all its forms—vocal, liturgical, ejaculatory, mental, contemplative, etc. Our life of prayer should be such that even when we are immersed in the things of the world due to our work and our temporal duties, we would still be aware of God’s presence, and it is doing God’s will that should always motivate us. Our faith tells us that God is everywhere. It should not be hard to find him. 

 The plan definitely should include practices that will foster our spirit of sacrifice, penance and purification, given the obvious fact that no matter how much we try to be good, we would always be hounded by our weaknesses and the temptations around, and the possibility of falling into sin is high. This spirit of sacrifice would help us discipline ourselves in order to rally all our faculties for the service of God and of everybody else. 

 The plan should include a daily effort of ascetical struggle where, aside from fighting evil, we should aim at growing in our love for God and others, by developing the virtues as well as always strengthening them. It should help us to develop a growing concern for the others, doing personal apostolate wherever we are and whatever the occasion and circumstance may be. 

 It should include the frequent recourse to the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist and confession. These spiritual and supernatural means are always effective, enabling us to be with Christ even if we do not feel his presence nor his interventions in our life. And it should also include some program of ongoing formation, knowing that our spiritual life would always need that. 

 It’s important to realize that the net effect of all these should be a strong and abiding feeling of intimacy with God, a strong attraction to him. We should not allow our attractions to stop at the level of some earthly and temporal goods only. It should be God and his will and ways that should attract us most. 

 We should also be wary of the constant danger of getting distracted. We have to identify the usual sources of our distractions and plan an appropriate strategy to deal with them properly.

Curing our ignorance

THE readings of the Mass of the Third Sunday of Easter, Year B, (Acts 3,13-15.17-19; 1 Jn 2,1-5; Lk 24-35-48) tell us that it was out of ignorance that the people then crucified Christ, the very savior of mankind, but that Christ offered mercy to them. They, as well as all of us, are now enjoined to be penitent and to be converted, and to know the real Christ by knowing and living God’s commandments. 

 This should be a main concern of ours—how to know Christ properly. It should be a knowledge that is not merely intellectual, but rather existential, affecting and involving our whole being in the different aspects and dimensions of our life. 

 It cannot be denied that we often think we can attain true knowledge simply by depending on our sciences, technologies, philosophies and ideologies. While these sources of human knowledge offer us a lot of data, information, facts, etc., unless they are inspired, pursued and developed with love and ultimate identification with Christ as prime motive and final goal, we would still be prone to commit grave mistakes. 

 And the worst part of it is that those mistakes can be committed even with some good intentions. That’s what happened to the Jews of Christ’s time. They thought that what they were doing in crucifying Christ was the good thing to do. 

 We have to be most wary of this danger and do everything to avoid and counter it. And the first thing to do is to seriously study the life and example of Christ who can also be described as the fullness of the revelation of God to us. In other words, he is the fullness of truth that we need to know and live by. 

 We need to realize that Christ is the fullness of God’s revelation in the sense that through him, God has communicated to mankind the totality of truths He chose to reveal to man. Be that as it may, we also have to realize that given the disparity between the supernatural nature of God and our wounded human nature that is being drawn to God, this Christian revelation is not yet completely explicit. 

 In other words, our task to know Christ by following his will and commandments will always be a work in progress. We can never say that we will know everything. The perfection of our knowledge of Christ can only come about through God’s grace. Ours is simply to be as docile as possible to what God will be showing and sharing with us. 

 In this, we have these relevant words of St. Paul: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6) These words of St. Paul should remind us that while we should be as aggressive as we can in knowing Christ’s life and example, in living out his commandments, we should also be humble to acknowledge our total dependence on God’s grace. 

 This is how we can truly be wise with the wisdom that was described in the Letter of St. James in this way: “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceful, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” (3,17) 

 This wisdom can only be shown in one’s good life and in deeds that are done in humility. Otherwise, it can be a wisdom, as St. James said, that is “earthly, unspiritual, demonic.”

When God tests us

ACTUALLY, our whole life here on earth is a test God gives us, to see if what he wants us to be, that is, to be his image and likeness, sharers of his divine life and nature is also what we ourselves would want to be. 

 Thus, we are given intelligence to enable us to know this truth about ourselves, and the will to enable us to freely choose to follow God’s will and designs for us or not. We should therefore realize very deeply and abidingly that the main purpose of our intelligence and will is to comply with God’s will for us. Using them mainly for other purposes—personal, professional, political, etc.—would be misusing these God-given faculties of ours. 

 Of course, to pass the test we need to follow God’s will. That’s where we achieve our true and basic dignity as persons and children of God. That’s also where we find our true joy, where we use properly our intelligence, will and other endowments, where we enjoy our true freedom. 

 But there are special occasions when this test God is giving us is quite clear and direct. We are reminded of this fact of life in the gospel of the Mass of Friday of the Second Week of Easter (cfr. Jn 6,1-15) where Christ tested his apostles if they could feed about 5 thousand people with 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. 

 As the gospel narrated, Christ asked one of the apostles, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” To which the apostle responded, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” The gospel noted that Christ said this to test his apostles. 

 When we find ourselves in some extraordinary difficulty, we should not hesitate to go to Christ. On these occasions, Christ is simply testing us. He knows what to do. We should just have faith in him. 

 Let’s beg him for help, but making sure that what should move us to do so is not so much to be rid of the difficulty as to be believe in him as our savior, as our God in whose image and likeness we have been created. In the end, we go to him to be like him, and not just for some self-interest or for some practical purposes. 

 We need to exert effort to have the proper intention whenever we ask some extraordinary favors from God. That’s because very often we are moved to run to God only for some practical motives. We forget that in all our dealings with God, the main and constant reason is to adore him and to express our desire to be like him as he wants us to be. 

 We should be careful not to let our great difficulties set aside the main reason for asking favors from God. This is actually a big challenge for us, since with our tendency to consider only the here and now, we forget to pursue the real and ultimate purpose of our life. 

 This, of course, will require a certain discipline on our part. That’s why we need to avail of certain practices of piety that would constantly remind us of the main reason for any petitions we make from God. 

 This is a big challenge that would require us to be sober and to learn how to be contemplative even while we are in the midst of the ups and downs of our earthly life. We have to broaden our understanding of the character and purpose of our life here on earth, and know the purpose, the causes and the reason for our human predicaments.

Making Christ the center of our life

WE should always feel the need to always strengthen our belief in Christ. That’s because with all the things that we have to grapple with everyday, there’s always the tendency to set Christ aside and to fall into depending on our own human estimation of things alone or to let ourselves simply to drift where the currents of world would lead us. 

 Let’s remember that as we are reminded in the gospel of the Mass on Thursday of the Second Week of Easter (cfr. Jn 3,31-36), “whoever believes in the Son (Christ) has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.” 

 We need to do everything to make Christ the constant focus and center of our life. May everything that we do, from our thoughts and desires to our words and deeds, begin with Christ as the inspiration, continue with Christ as our main help, and reach its goal with Christ as the main guide. 

 Let’s convince ourselves that any way of being and acting that is outside of this loop would expose us to deadly moral and spiritual dangers. Thus, right from the beginning of the day, as when we wake up, the first thing that should come to mind is regain this awareness that we need Christ always. 

 And so, we should develop the practice of making a morning offering to Christ of everything that will take place on that day as soon as we get up from bed in the morning. It’s what saints and many other people have been doing to set the proper human and supernatural tone to their daily affairs, giving them a sense of direction and purpose for the day. 

 It’s usually done by greeting Christ as soon as one wakes up. The effort to give the first thought of the day to Christ is all worthwhile since it corresponds to the fundamental reality that our life is always, from beginning to end, a shared life with Christ and therefore also with God the Father, Creator, and God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. 

 Our life, of course, can be described in many, endless ways. But we should first realize that it’s a shared life with God. It's a life in the Spirit, a life of grace. It's a participation in the intimate Trinitarian life of God. We have to remember that we have been created in love and for love, and that love should be the basic governing principle of our life, that love that is the very essence of God. 

 In other words, our life has to mirror the life of God himself, whose image and likeness we are. Since God is love, is self-giving, then we too have to live in love and in self-giving. 

 That means giving ourselves to God and to others. That's what an offering is, what a gift is. It has to be given away freely, because as our Christian faith tells us, it's when we give that we receive, when we lose that we win, when we suffer that we gain in glory. Besides, we are told that since we have been freely and generously given by God, we should also freely and generously give ourselves to Him and to the others. (cfr. Mt 10,8) 

 It's a mysterious law, spiritual and supernatural, that goes way beyond our natural understanding of things, or our common sense. But that's how it is. We need to live by that law, because outside of it, we expose ourselves to danger, to harm and to our own destruction.

Assuming God’s attitude toward sinners

THIS is a great challenge for us! Since we are God’s image and likeness, we should also try to assume the very same attitude God has towards sinners, or towards anyone with whom we have some differences and conflicts. 

 And what is this attitude? It’s spelled out clearly in the gospel of Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter. (cfr. Jn 3, 16-21) “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” 

 We have to be always merciful and understanding, willing to suffer for the others—and so, a lot of patience is needed—if we want to have the same attitude God has toward any sinner or offender. We need to understand that though we may not understand fully why this is so, this attitude is an essential part of that divine wisdom we too are supposed to develop and have. 

 To be sure, we can say that the reason God has this attitude is that irrespective of how we are, we at bottom are all children of God. We have to love one another just as God loves everyone of us. He hates no one. He hates the sin or the wrong committed, but he never hates the sinner. His consuming passion is to save, not to condemn. Failing to love and to be merciful is to pervert our true dignity as children of God. 

 This is going to be a big challenge for us since we cannot deny that the pervading world culture nowadays does not have this attitude. What is promoted is radical self-assertion, self-indulgence, and the like. The law of Talion, not of charity, is the standard followed. We are prodded to be quick to condemn, to fight back, to exact revenge, etc. We are primed to make ourselves our own lawgiver, our own king, our own creator. 

 We may just take a quick look around, for example, in the media, and what do we see? A lot of movies, talk shows, even commercials, whose story lines, plots and narratives appeal more to our raw emotions, primitive instincts, with the light of reason and most especially of Christian faith, practically shut off. 

 Talk shows, especially of the political type, retail biased, fanatically partisan opinions, as if only one party has all the right things and the others have all the wrong things. They are prone to inventing stories and highly hypothetical speculations without ample basis, and to making all sorts of spins. Many times, even common sense and the basic principles of logic are openly violated. And they can be very articulate in doing all these. 

 In the movies, there is a lot of bullying and trolling shown, there is violence galore. They blatantly market one-upmanship. Perceived cases of evils and injustice are resolved with subtle forms of evils and injustice as well. Even the news networks often fall to making what is now known as “fake news.” 

 The way to counter all these is to exert every effort to truly identify ourselves with God whose love and justice is shown and shared with us through Christ. This will obviously require a great sacrifice because as Christ said, if we want to follow him, we have to deny ourselves and carry the cross. (cfr. Mt 16,24-26) There is no other formula that can address this big challenge properly!

The challenge of Christian poverty

THE readings of Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter (Act 4,32-37 / Jn 3,7-15) somehow reminds us of two things: we need to live Christian poverty which demands all from us, and for that to take place, we need to be “born again,” so that the spirit of Christ would truly animate us and not just our human spirit. 

 Christian poverty is no joke. As depicted in the first reading, the believers of Christ sold or turned over everything, created a common fund which was distributed to everyone according to their needs. 

 This is a big challenge for us, considering that we always tend to get attached to the things of this world in a way that undermines true love that channels the very love of God for all of us. 

 Let us remember that in our relation with God, there is no middle ground. It is either we are with him completely or not at all. We have to overcome that strong tendency to think that we can be partly with God and partly with our own selves, even if we can say that we are giving God 99% of what we have and keep only 1% for us. 

 We have to give all! In fact, with God we have to give our very own selves, and not only things, not only some possessions. Remember Christ telling us that we have to love God with “all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Mt 22,37) 

 Let’s hope that we can echo these words of an old song: “I have no use for divided hearts. I give mine whole, and not in parts.” Let’s strive to reach that goal. It’s not an easy goal, but neither is it impossible. With God’s grace and our all-out humble efforts, we can hack it. 

 But given our human condition which allows us to learn things in stages, we have to understand that everyday we have to conquer our tendency to some earthly attachments so that we can say we are giving ourselves more and more to God until we give ourselves completely to him. 

 We have to learn to let go of our possessions, our preferences, our opinions, etc., until we can say that we are letting go of our whole selves so as to give everything to God. 

 This is what generosity is all about. Instead of feeling emptied, we feel filled with peace and joy. No earthly happening can add or diminish that peace and joy. It’s a peace and joy that can only be the effect of having God with us. As St. Teresa once said, “Solo Dios basta,” with God we have enough. 

 Christian poverty is never a state of misery and pure suffering and privation, even if in human eyes it can be seen that way. It is always motivated by love of God and neighbor, and is filled with all goodness, generosity and magnanimity. 

 It is a spirit of total self-giving that goes beyond any effort at quantification and measure. It’s never a matter of how much we give and keep. It’s purely a matter of total self-giving that identifies us with God of whom we are supposed to be his image and likeness. 

 We have to learn to develop and live this true spirit of Christian poverty which first of all would need God’s grace which we have to constantly beg and, of course, to exert our all-out effort.

“Behold, a virgin shall conceive”

THAT’S from the first reading of the Mass of the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord. (cfr. Is 7,14) It’s a prophecy about the long-expected Redeemer. It somehow already describes the Messiah as both God and man. As such, this Messiah can rightly be called “Emmanuel,” meaning, God with us. 

 But this virginal conception and birth of our Savior can also be taken to mean that like Mary, we too can virginally conceive the very Son of God, our Redeemer, since in the first place he actually wants to be born in us. That’s because as image and likeness of God, we are meant to share the very life, nature and power of God as shown and made available to us by Christ. 

 We may not be virgins in the natural and physical sense of the word, but, yes, we can be virgins and capable of the virginal conception and birth of Christ if like Mary, we give our whole self to God’s will for us. 

 And that will is none other than that we be one with Christ, as fully as we can, to such an extent that we can be “cor unum et anima una” (in one heart and one soul) with Christ, and because of that, we also can be “cor unum and anima una” among ourselves. 

 We should just try to echo the same response of Mary, “Be it done to me according to your word,” because this birth of Christ in us requires a divine and supernatural intervention. It cannot take place through some natural process alone. 

 We need to process this truth of our faith about ourselves very slowly, because it will obviously astound us to think that we are supposed to be one with Christ. Who, me, one with Christ? We most likely would be tempted to say, tell it to the Marines! 

 But that’s just the naked truth about us, whether we like it or not. We cannot be any other if we just bother also to know why it is so. An expression that is relevant to this matter is ‘alter Christus,’ another Christ. And it’s worthwhile to know what it is all about. 

 We are supposed to be ‘alter Christus,’ the goal and ideal that is meant for us, though we need also to do our part, free beings as are, to achieve that status. God, our Creator and Father, wants us to be that way, though he does not impose it on us without our consent that should also be shown with deeds and not just with intentions or words. 

 We are supposed to be ‘alter Christus’ simply because, if we have been created in the image and likeness of God, and Christ is the Son of God who is the perfect image and likeness that God has of himself, then we can only conclude that we have to be like Christ. 

 We need to do everything to pursue that goal of assuming the very identity of Christ. For this, a strong faith is needed. And it should give rise to the appropriate action on our part, so that little by little we think, speak and do as Christ would think, speak and do. We should react to the different situations of our life the way Christ would. 

 So, at Christ’s birth on Christmas, let’s see if we can allow Christ to be born in us too! He wants it. We should also want it!

The pursuit for unity

IF we are truly with Christ, there is no doubt that despite our unavoidable differences and conflicts, we can still manage to achieve a certain unity. Christ gives us the way, the power and the grace to achieve this unity. 

 Thus, the expression, “cor unum et anima una,” (one heart and one soul) as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. (cfr. 4,32) It characterized the lives of the early Christians who fervently followed the teachings and example of Christ. Let’s hope that we too can manage to achieve that ideal. 

 To live unity amid plurality and diversity in our lives is a constant quest for us. How do we achieve unity, a desired ideal, amid an obvious plurality we can observe even in each one of us individually, not to mention the ever-widening variety of things among ourselves and between ourselves and the rest of creation? 

 It’s undeniable that deep within us is a natural longing for unity in whatever level and aspect of our life, whether personal, familial, social, political, or cultural, etc. Without articulating it, we somehow know that unity presumes life and order which we like to enjoy, just as disunity connotes death and disorder which we try to avoid. 

 The unity we are looking for, of course, is not uniformity and an idle, passive and automatic unity. It’s a dynamic, living unity that has to be worked out, precisely because it is not merely physical unity we are after. It’s a moral unity that involves how we understand and use our freedom, and this can turn in any which way. 

 Equally undeniable is the plurality that we have to contend with, not only of the different parts we are made of individually, but also of the different views, opinions, tastes and preferences, cultures, lifestyles, etc., that we have to learn to live with among ourselves in the different levels of our collective life. 

 What we have to do is to seek this unity amid the plurality in our lives is to go to the source and author of unity. In other words, the ever-complicating plurality we have is a call for us to go to God, the Creator of the universe. 

 He is the one that holds everything in unity, from beginning to end. He is the universal lawgiver, who has designed everything—the spiritual and material, the animate and inanimate beings—into one unified universe, governing everything with his providence. 

 He knows what to do with whatever situation the world may go as played out by the way we use our freedom. His wisdom cannot be outwitted by the smartest and most cunning of human intelligence and freedom. 

 We have to understand then that for us to have unity amid the plurality in this world, the unity we have to build should first of all and always be a religious unity, before it is a social, political, cultural or historical unity. 

 Absent that religious essence of unity, we would be reprising the story of the tower of Babel where a godless pursuit of unity and development produced disunity and confusion instead, leading to the unavoidable consequences of conflicts and wars among the people. 

 This is what we are witnessing these days, and all throughout our human history. A unity not springing from the unity of God and with God is a false and deceptive unity that often attracts all kinds of danger. We need to ground our pursuit for unity amid plurality on our loving and faithful relationship with God.

Christ always takes the initiative

INDEED, Christ always takes the initiative to show himself to us, to come and to be with us. Being both God and man, whose essence is pure love, he will always be with us, showering us with all the goodness and power that he gratuitously shares with us. We should just try our best to be as quick as possible to receive and welcome him and unite ourselves with him which is what we are meant to be. 

 This truth of our faith is highlighted in that gospel reading of the Mass for Friday of the Easter Octave (cfr. Jn 21,1-14) where the resurrected Christ appeared to his apostles who were fishing in the Sea of Tiberias. They at first did not recognize him, but when they caught a big haul of fish after being told by him where to cast their nets, that was when they recognized him. 

 This truth of our faith is also highlighted in that episode where Christ appeared to two disciples who were on their way to Emmaus. (cfr. Lk 24,13-35) They also at first did not recognize him when he approached them. It was only later when at table Christ broke bread with them that they did and that filled them with great awe. 

 To be sure, Christ is always present in us and in the world. He can never be absent, even in our worst moments. Even when we ignore him or intentionally go against him, he will still be with us. Consider the case of St. Paul who in his campaign against the early Christians was called directly by Christ to be one of his apostles. (cfr. Act 9,1-19) 

 But ordinarily, we can only recognize Christ if we have the desire to do so, carrying out all the relevant tasks to convert that desire into reality. For this, we need to study the life, words and deeds of Christ as portrayed in the gospels and taught by the Church. We need to develop a growing life of piety, animated by the proper spirit and supported by some practices, like prayer, sacrifices, ascetical struggles, etc. 

 We have to realize that in everything that we do, the first, last and constant intention we ought to have is to look for Christ in order to find and love him. Only in this way can we be in a position to recognize Christ. 

 We should not just be contented with pursuing a natural or human goal in all the things we have to do, like meeting a deadline, complying with some requirements, achieving a level of efficiency, profitability, etc., which while legitimate can be dangerous if not related to the main goal of looking, finding and loving Christ. 

 We should be able to find Christ not only in our good and happy moments, but most especially in our difficult situations and predicaments when we are made to suffer or to feel that we are the victims, the receiving and losing end in our differences and conflicts with others. 

 When we manage to be humble, patient, charitable, magnanimous and merciful in these situations, we can be sure that we would be in a better position to recognize Christ in all the parties involved in our differences and conflicts. 

 Most importantly, we should try our best to find Christ in the ordinary little things that we deal with everyday. Let’s never forget what he said to his disciples: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Mt 28,20) 

 Let’s start by finding Christ in the little things of our day.

In the end, it’s ignorance

THERE’S an interesting thing that St. Peter told the people who were amazed at his being able to make a lame man walk. After reproaching them for killing the very man who is the “author of life,” referring of course to Christ, (cfr. Act 11,15), he told them, “Brethren, I know that you did it through ignorance, as did also your rulers.” (cfr. Acts 11,17) 

 Yes, in the end, it’s ignorance that would lead us to commit error and sin in general. That’s because if we really know the real thing, why would we go against it? The problem is we really do not know what real knowledge is and, therefore, what ignorance also is. 

 Obviously, real knowledge can only be attained when one is truly identified with God who is the very author of truth. Knowledge that is attained independently of God, and is pursued simply by studying all sorts of sciences we have and all the other human and worldly sources of knowledge, can only be at best chancy. It may coincide with the truth or not. 

 When Pilate asked Christ, “What is truth?” (Jn 18,38), Christ simply kept quiet knowing that Pilate was looking directly at Truth himself, truth that is not simply mathematical, economic, social, cultural, etc. 

 Ignorance, therefore, is when we pursue knowledge independently of God. Even if such knowledge is a result of arduous study and a great accumulation of data and information, if it is not based on God, it would still be a false knowledge, which is another name for ignorance. 

 Sooner or later, it will lead us to go against God, as it encourages us to go after self-indulgence. Right now, many developments around the world point to that fact. Flaunting their so-called rich knowledge, many people have changed even the law of nature, and have gone to the extent of declaring themselves atheists, non-believers of God. And the effect is war instead of peace, division instead of unity, hatred instead of love. 

 Yes, it is this ignorance that led to the crucifixion of Christ. And yet, in spite of that, Christ offers forgiveness when he said: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Lk 23,34) 

 We should try our best that our pursuit for knowledge begins and ends with God. Outside of that orbit, let’s convince ourselves that we would be doing it wrongly and dangerously. Thus, we should be strict in keeping the proper rectitude of intention when we study and do things to grow in knowledge. 

 The ideal situation should be that any progress in our knowledge should also show growth in our love for God and for everybody. Absent that, again let’s convince ourselves that we would be doing it wrongly. 

 To be sure, it’s not enough to be very scholarly. The pursuit of knowledge should lead us to be holy. After all, that is the ultimate and common goal we have. And the greatest failure we can have, in spite of whatever successes we can have in the different aspects of our life, is when we fail to become saints. 

 Let’s see to it that every time we study or do anything in pursuit of knowledge, we should put ourselves first of all in the presence of God, and remind ourselves clearly of the real purpose of our study.