Touched by John Paul the Great

YEAR 2014 is fast becoming a very special year for me. There actually are many reasons for this, and all of them leave me profoundly thankful and nervous. But among the reasons is the most gratifying fact that two men, very close to my heart, will be raised to the altars in this Year of the Laity.

            One is Bishop Alvaro del Portillo, successor of Opus Dei founder, St. Josemaria Escriva, who will be beatified in Madrid on September 27. He ordained me to the diaconate in Rome on January 28, 1991. It was his first time to ordain candidates to the priesthood, since he was just consecrated bishop a few weeks earlier that year.

            The other is Blessed Pope John Paul II who will be canonized saint on April 27. By an extreme stroke of luck and, I believe, a pure bolt of grace, I was chosen as one of those to be ordained priest by him in Rome that year on May 26, Trinity Sunday.

            The moment I was told I would be ordained by Pope John Paul II, I literally froze in disbelief. Spontaneous and strong flow of prayers came a little later. I stammered in thanking God for the great gift, then I started to trace what brought me to that life-changing event.

            I don’t think I was a particularly religious person when I was a kid. All I had in mind was to play and be naughty, just like anybody else among my friends. But my mother saw to it that I prayed the Rosary with her and some of my siblings who happened to be caught by her at the moment.

            She it was who instilled in me, among many other things, love and veneration for the Pope. My lola and the teachers in grade school, mostly nuns, did the same. And I just developed that love to the point that whenever I saw a picture of Pope John XXIII, the Pope at that time, I felt good and holy and somehow urged to behave.

            The nuns in school encouraged me to enter the seminary, but when I brought the idea to my father, he said, no way. And so I forgot about priesthood and pursued what everybody else among my friends was pursuing. At that time, all I wanted was to become rich and all that thingamajig.

            But I met Opus Dei while studying in college in Manila. And my life changed, made a sharp turn. Well, that’s now history.

            My love and fascination for the Pope grew even more. When Pope Paul VI visited Manila, I happened to stay just a few houses from where the Nunciature, where he stayed, was.

            I remember standing the whole day right in front of the Nunciature together with the crowd just to have a glimpse of him. And when I had those glimpses, it was as if I was floating on air with joy. Prayer when infused with joy became effortless.

            Then entered Pope John Paul II in 1978. At that time, I was already a professional man, working in some office, but also into deep philosophical and theological studies. It was he who sort of challenged me to take more seriously my Christian formation.

            I found him irresistibly stimulating and engaging. I was sure his presence, his words, even his mannerisms were all so soaked with a certain charism that I just found myself insatiably devouring his writings and any piece of news about him. I knew I was learning a lot and growing interiorly.

            When he visited Manila in 1981, I volunteered to be part of a press team. That enabled me to see him at close range. It was in Baclaran church, his first stop after arriving at the Manila airport, when I had the first chance almost to touch him if not for the security who stopped me at the last split second.

            Then I was asked to go to Rome for ecclesiastical studies. I actually did not seek the priesthood. I simply was called to it, and I just said, yes, after a little reflection.

            I still vividly remember every moment of that day of my ordination. What struck me most was that he started it very tired. He just came in from a trip and he already had serious health conditions. But as the event went on, I noticed he became very alive. At the end, he talked to me as if he knew me all along.

            I have no doubt he is truly a saint!

Toward an Easter person

WE are now in the Easter season, extending the happy celebration of the Resurrection of Christ, that tremendous and overwhelming divine gift that re-creates us and reconciles us with God our Father from whom we come and to whom we belong.

            We gleefully sing Happy Easter, Rejoice and Alleluia. But let’s not turn a deaf ear to the call of the season. We are asked to become an Easter person. The way is laid open to us to be so. It’s for us to take it up and go the distance.

            To be an Easter person is first of all a gift from God. It’s his divine will for us, since we are his image and likeness, and adopted children of his. For sure, we achieve the fullness of our being Easter persons in heaven. But here on earth, we need to work it out. We have to move toward it.

            The grace for this is given to us abundantly. Everything that we need to attain this goal is provided by God’s providence. But we have to correspond. New wine requires new wineskins too. And as St. Augustine once said: “He who created us without us, cannot save us without us.”

            To be an Easter person is for us to realize that as persons we need to unify and integrate all the parts and aspects of our life, with God through Christ in the Spirit as the principle, means and end of such unity and integration. What we should try to avoid being fragmented in these parts and aspects.

            That’s because, first of all, to be a person is to be one subject of several aspects, foremost of which is our spiritual dimension that makes us rational, capable of knowing, willing and entering into relationships with others.

            But we have to contend also with our being material beings, with flesh and blood, and emotions and passions, etc. The most radical unity we ought to have is unity with God by being “another Christ,” as the saints have been saying.

            This is when we can aspire to achieve the fundamental unity between our body and soul. Then we have to cope with several other elements that we need to unify. We can expect ourselves to be stable and focused amid the different situations and predicaments in our life—whether we are healthy or sick, successful or frustrated, etc.

            We have learn to blend our prayer and work, contemplation and action, privacy and social life, etc. We also have to integrate our faith and reason, the theoretical and the practical things in life, etc. Then we need to harmonize the different roles we play as parents, children, professionals, friends, lovers, etc.

            To be an Easter person is when we manage somehow to harmonize all these segments and components of our life such that our body, for example, in spite of its numerous modalities and possibilities, can truly reveal the state of our soul. Many times, the soul goes one way, the body the other. It’s an anomaly we have to resolve.

            This ideal is, of course, easier said than done. There will always be need for effort and struggle. Tension among the different aspects of our life will always be present. We just have to weave a way of finding simplicity amid the complexity of our life.

            The end result should be a driving awareness that we are another Christ who know how to look for sanctity and do apostolate in any circumstance of our life. We have to learn how to relate everything to him to get the proper light and impulse on how to go about whatever situation, circumstance, condition or predicament we can be in.

            We have to remember that Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. He is the one that gives meaning, direction and fulfilment in any situation we are in. This truth of our faith should not be left in the level of theory and desire. It has to be pursued and acted upon until we can confidently say, “Yes, I am now living with Christ.”

            This is not presumption, though it can also be if we do not keep our side of the bargain. Christ wants us to pray, to know and love him. “Come, follow me,” he said. “If you want to follow me, you have to deny yourself and carry the cross.”

            Let’s remember that to be an Easter person, we must by definition be willing to go through the passion and death of Christ, so we too can resurrect with him!

Divine mercy not meant to spoil us

OUR Christian faith tells us that God’s love for us is eternal. It’s a love that goes all the way to showing mercy for us in the form of his Son becoming man and taking up all the sins of men by dying on the cross. No greater love can there be other than this love of God for us.

            St. Paul drives home this point when he said in his Letter to the Romans: “He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how has he not also, with him, given us all things?” (8,32)

            That’s why, in spite of our proclivity to sin and make a mess of our own lives, we can always have reason to be hopeful, because God never gives up on us. The problem is that we can give up on him and go our own desperate ways which we try to sweeten with all sorts of defense mechanisms.

            We just have to make sure that we do not get spoiled by that love, because even if God’s love and mercy is eternal, his justice is never sacrificed. His mercy and justice always go together, in proportions, if we have to speak in human terms, that are just right.

            That divine justice unleashes its power precisely when with all the infinite goodness of God, we fail to return good with good, love with love. Instead, we allow ourselves to get spoiled.

            Let’s not forget that getting spoiled is a human choice. It’s not part of God’s plan and will for us. But since our freedom is a real freedom, and not just an imitation, we also have the power to return good with evil, love with hatred.

            It’s important therefore that we realize very deeply that our true freedom is when it is lived with God, not outside of him. It is lived when, instead of fleeing from him like a fugitive when we commit sin, we go to him to ask for forgiveness and change our life.

            St. Peter asked for forgiveness when he denied Christ, not only once but three times. And as a movie spiel would have it, a saint is not one without a past, and neither is a sinner without a future. Everything depends on whether we return to God or not.

            So, instead of getting spoiled by the abundant and certain mercy of God, we should rther learn to react properly. And that is none other than to repay love with love. There should be an impulse in us to grow better and mature in our spiritual life of love for God and others. Absent this impulse, the only possibility is to get spoiled.

            This love is shown when we develop a true and deep spirit of penance. We have to learn to acknowledge our sins and weaknesses. We cannot return to the right path unless we first acknowledge our mistakes. We should be man enough to do that, always at the impulse of grace which God never refuses to give.

            We should always presume that there is something wrong with us. Not that we have to cultivate a negative attitude toward ourselves, since we neither can deny that we also have, thank God, a lot of good and positive things in us. We just have to be realistic and acknowledge this wounded condition of ours as a given in our life.

            Much of our problem stems precisely from the fact that we tend to gloss over our sinfulness. This is actually a form of cowardice, or at least an inappropriate way of dealing with our objective situation, much like the ostrich hiding its head in the sand to avoid some dangers.

            Acknowledging our sins, mistakes, weaknesses, failures, etc., is never a wrong thing to do. It is the first step to healing, to being forgiven, to setting things right again. Thus, we need to make regular examination of conscience and acts of contrition. And then confession, a sacrament that has tremendous powers of forgiving our sins.

            This practice of acknowledging our sin and confessing will help us to know ourselves better, and to give ourselves an idea of where to get some help. It will make our conscience both sensitive and delicate, on the hand, and strong and more resistant to temptations, on the other.

            As human persons, we are meant to seek help. No one can live properly without the help of others. And this is especially true in our spiritual life. We need spiritual directors and confessors.