Lent is coming

FEBRUARY 13 is Ash Wednesday for this year, and with it we start
another liturgical season of Lent. It’s good that we once again relish
the true essence and purpose of the period. We actually need to do
this in any part of the year to capture the spiritual and supernatural
dimensions of our life that we often take for granted.

Pope Benedict XVI has already given out his Lenten message for this
year that zeroes in on the indissoluble relation between faith and
charity. It’s a wonderful message, so characteristic of his very
theological mind, which should not be confined only to intellectuals
and considered in strictly intellectual circuits.

It should be spread far and wide, and be made to penetrate deep and
lasting in the minds and hearts of believers. That’s why we need to
learn how to reflect and meditate, then assimilate what is seen and
understood into attitudes, deeds, skills and virtues, and then learn
how to transmit the things imbibed to others.

    In his message, the Pope precisely talks about evangelization as the
greatest work of charity toward others. “There is no action more
beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbor
than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him the Good
News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God:
evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the
human person.”

    There’s a crying need for us to sit down and reflect on these words.
Let’s hope that we can give time to this concern and exert the
appropriate effort to translate these words into life, both personal
and social.

At this time, we cannot afford to be casual and cavalier in this duty.
The world is getting increasingly secularized and paganized, with God
relegated into the sidelines, if not totally banished.

If not that, then God is not considered anymore as the transcendent
God, the Supreme Being who revealed and continues to reveal himself to
us. He is just a human invention. God has become a formalism, a detail
of political correctness.

We are seeing this disturbing phenomenon taking place not only in
individuals but also in institutions and societies, and even
governments, with powerful resources to promote their own idea of God,
the politically correct God.

Lent is a good occasion to go back to God. But we have to understand
that as involving a lot of sacrifice and struggle. Thus, the Pope in
his message says that “Christian life consists in continuously scaling
the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love
and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters
with God’s own love.”

We should look forward to the discipline that Lent encourages us to
live. It is truly good for us. And anyway, we cannot avoid having to
grapple with suffering and ascetical struggle due to our wounded human
nature. And so we really need to learn how to go through the
discipline to prepare ourselves for the challenges of life.

We should see all this as part of the Good News God has given us. It
should make us happy, and not too wary and afraid. We can consider it
as some kind of sport and exercise that require some sacrifice but
actually give us a lot more of benefits.

Truth is we need to learn the ways of spiritual combat, how to deal
with our own weaknesses and do constant battle with the temptations
around. We need to learn how to grow in the virtues, since we usually
tend toward laziness, disorder, imprudence, vanity, pride, gluttony
and lust.

Most of all, we need to learn how to know, love and serve God in a way
that is directly felt and continuously done. All of this requires some
kind of training, planning and a whole range of discipline. There are
stages to go through, and so we need to articulate as clearly and as
specifically the appropriate plans for each stage.

We obviously need to ask for grace always, since it is grace that
should underlie all the efforts. Without it, we cannot go very far in
our spiritual growth. And thus, aside from prayer, we need to avail of
the sacraments, the usual channels for grace to come to us.

Let’s hope that this season of Lent will truly give a big boost in our
spiritual life. If we try to be professional about it also, we should
devise ways to see if indeed such growth has taken place at the end of
Lent.

Great miracles still do happen today

WE need to do a little adjustment in our understanding of miracles.
The common idea is that miracles are only those astounding cases of
cures and healings performed by Christ in the course of his ministry
in the distant past, as recorded in the gospels.

That conception, I believe, is unfairly restrictive as it blinds us to
what really is most important that can happen in the life of a person.
And that is none other than the resurrection of a soul moribund or
even dead in sin. Plus the fact that within our midst is God and his
power to bring us back to him regardless of our miseries.

This kind of miracles takes place every time one approaches Christ in
faith, and either in a personal, intimate way or in the sacrament of
confession, he expresses his contrition and his resolution to do
better.

Remember that episode of Christ curing the man sick of the palsy lying
in bed (cfr. Mt 9). He told the sick man that his sins were forgiven.
And when the scribes and the Pharisees were questioning why Christ
dared to forgive sins, that was when he proceeded to cure the man of
his palsy.

That miracle was made to highlight the event that was greater than
just the cure of the palsy. It was made to show that Christ had the
power to forgive sins and that the forgiveness of sins is of a higher
importance than the cure of the palsy.

We should not lose sight of these fundamental realities as we also
long for and enjoy the very amazing physical and external effects of
the miracles involved in cases of cures and healing.

We need to learn to see the spiritual and supernatural causes and
effects of the miracles that happened in the gospel and may happen
even up to now. We need to learn to discipline our feelings and
emotions so that they do not hinder us in appreciating the more
important aspects of the miracles.

Today, miracles continue to happen, and even big, very dramatic ones,
for as long as we have faith in Christ who continues to be with us in
a living way in the sacraments, in the doctrine of our faith, in the
Church, etc.

Let’s remember that only those with faith in Christ received the
miracles. Thus, to the woman sick with hemorrhage who exerted great
effort just to touch his clothes, Christ said it was her faith that
cured her.

Miracles are a matter of faith, faith that is shown with deeds and
that musters all the human powers we have to pursue and live it. That
is the problem that we have at the moment. Our faith is wavering and
must not even be as big as a mustard seed because it’s a faith that
cannot move mountains.

We don’t have that kind of faith of that woman with hemorrhage, nor
that of the paralytic brought by friends who had to cut a hole in the
roof to bring the paralytic right in front of Christ.

In our days, we have simple people who because of their overflowing
faith light candles and dance before sacred images and do many other
things just to ask for a favor. Many of them receive what they ask.

They often get ridiculed by the supposedly more “educated” and
“enlightened” people. But they actually live out what St. Paul
considers as God’s fools and God’s weaklings who actually confound the
so-called wise and strong of this world.

Those who did not have faith, Christ withdrew from them. Thus, even to
his townspeople who questioned his credibility, Christ did not perform
any miracles nor did many good things, giving substance to the claim
that God resists the proud but gives grace

We need to work on our faith, but a faith purified of ulterior motives
and fringe benefits. It has to be a faith pure and earnest that, while
immersed in the flesh and the world, also knows how to transcend them.

One clear occasion where great miracles can happen would be in the
sacrament of confession. That’s where we go to Christ to ask for
forgiveness for our sins, many times precisely the very sickness and
human misery that we need to be cured and relieved of by God’s mercy.

We become a new man every time we emerge from confession. That’s
because God’s grace heals us of our sins which truly separate us from
our true joy. That’s infinitely better than just being healed of our
physical illnesses.

Reaching God

THOUGH we don’t hear it nor speak about it often, the reality of fools
obviously continues to take place today and, in fact, in a more
rampant albeit subtle ways. I suppose it is out of good manners that
we refrain from using the word. We actually now employ a lot of
euphemisms to refer to the same banana.

In a sense, it is good that it be that way. Refraining from using the
word in our daily conversations, I imagine, would make for a cleaner
and calmer environment. But neither should we forget it, since the
reality, sad to say, continues to be around.

In fact, the Bible speaks about fools and its variants many, many
times, thus, often jarring the sensibilities of the people of today.
This is one more reason why the Bible has to be handled with
deliberate care, since its language belongs to a different age and to
a different culture.

But the Bible teaches truths for all times and defines things in their
radical and ultimate dimensions. As to what a fool is and what things
fools do, the Bible, especially in the books of Psalms and the
Proverbs, has a lot to say.

Many times, it defines a fool as anyone who does not believe in God.
“The fool says in his heart, there is no God,” Psalm 14,1 says. And
Proverbs 1,7 describes something about fools: “The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

And so a long series of descriptions about fools continues all the way
to the New Testament. We have the famous parable of the wise and
foolish virgins, for example, and passages about how a foolish man who
only hears but does not act on the word of God is like a fool who
builds his house on sand, without good foundation.

The Book of Ecclesiastes sums up the whole thing when it says:
“Infinitus est numerus stultorum,” (Infinite is the number of fools),
referring not only to the number of fools but also to their ways,
since our freedom, which launches us into infinity, can be used either
for good or for evil, distinguishing the wise from the fool.

In spite of all these, there is always hope for as long as we are
still alive and capable of changing and converting. “Where sin has
abounded, grace has abounded even more,” says St. Paul (Rom 5,20).

So, there’s no use simply branding people fools and then lamenting
about the predicament. What we need to do is to understand why many
people still are fools in the biblical sense, and try to do something
about it.

And the common reason for this is that they do not know how to relate
themselves to God. They don’t see him, they cannot touch him, they
don’t have any special feelings for him.

There is obviously some ignorance and confusion involved here. While
it’s true that we don’t see God, nor touch him, we cannot deny that
God is everywhere, since he is the very author and the very supporter
of everyone’s and everything’s existence. By merely existing, everyone
and everything unavoidably reflects God’s eternal existence.

Besides, to start relating to him and developing certain feelings for
him is a matter of loving. As long as we love, in any way we express
our love, we are at least already on the way to reaching God who is
love.

We just have to make sure that our loving is the right kind of loving.
And that ultimately means we need to conform our love to the love of
God who revealed and lived it to the full in Christ.

Thus, Christ summarized all the commandments of God into the new
commandment of love: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Christ
makes himself the standard of our love that necessarily has two
inseparable objects: love of God and love of neighbor.

Loving God and thereby reaching him and being with him is actually not
difficult and much less, impossible to do, since loving God can simply
be a matter of loving others the way Christ loves all of us.

We need to be clear about this doctrine and do everything to live it.
It is very doable. We obviously need the grace of God for this, but
insofar as we are concerned, we can do it.

We just have to stir ourselves everyday to feel that love, making use
of some plans, devices or gimmicks to put us into the system. But we
can truly reach God here and now!