LENTEN THREESOME

                             LENTEN THREESOME

 Jesus summons us to follow him by imitating his bold example of praying and fasting in the desert for 40 days and nights and in giving himself to others to the last drop of his blood.
Just as the devil tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden and Jesus in the desert, so he seeks to tempt us to disorder our relationship with ourselves, others and God.
Fasting, almsgiving and prayer are the threesome antidotes. The more we fast and prioritize spiritual nourishment over material food, the less vulnerable we will be to being tempted by bread and earthly pleasures.
The more we sacrifice ourselves and our belongings for others’ good, the less prone we will be to giving in to the devil’s seductions to seek power or control over them.
In addition to being a great remedy against the seductions of the Evil One, these three traditional practices are also a great means to help us reorder our relationship to God, our neighbor and appetites.
First, prayer. If God is truly first in our lives, we will want to commit to making the loving dialogue with God our foremost priority.
Rather than squeezing him into our day when we have time, we resolve to center our whole lives on him. Some Lenten resolutions to do this would be to come to daily Mass, “stay awake” with him in Gethsemane through Eucharistic adoration or a daily Holy Hour, pray the Stations of the Cross on Fridays, or try to attend a Lenten mission or retreat.
Second, fasting. Many of us, though believers, live like materialists, laboring harder to stock our refrigerators than to nourish ourselves spiritually.
Fasting helps us to say No to the devil’s temptations to prioritize our stomachs over our souls. It allows us to subordinate our bodily desires and needs to those of the Spirit, to control our desires rather than let them control us. The fast I ordinarily recommend is threefold: to drink mainly water throughout Lent, give up condiments on food (salt, pepper, sugar, butter, ketchup, salad dressing), and forsake sweets and snacks between meals. That’s a type of fast that not only is healthy, but at the end of 40 days will fill you with the discipline that it takes to be a disciple!
Third, almsgiving. Our biggest spiritual cancer often flows from selfishness or egocentrism. That is why the Lord commands us to give alms; to look toward others’ needs, not just our own; to love others in deeds and not just wish them well;  and to take responsibility for others’ welfare, for as often as we fail to do something for them, we fail to care for Christ (Matthew 25:45).
How charitable should we be? We should try to give more than our surplus time or resources, but extend ourselves like the widow with her mite, something that will conform us to Christ’s standard of loving generosity. We should also be deliberate about our charity, not just engaging in “random acts of kindness,” but having a concerted game plan of self-sacrifice, just as Jesus had one toward us from before the world’s foundation.
Like sportspersons having seasonal training to get back to the basics after a monsoon off, so Lent is the time for Christians to get back to the building blocks of a life built on Christ.
Championships often depend on the work done to form the habits that lead to greatness. Catholics would similarly profit from using Lent to jump-start the plan to form the habits that lead to virtue and ultimately to the eternal “Hall of Fame.”

LENTEN THREESOME

                             LENTEN THREESOME

 Jesus summons us to follow him by imitating his bold example of praying and fasting in the desert for 40 days and nights and in giving himself to others to the last drop of his blood.
Just as the devil tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden and Jesus in the desert, so he seeks to tempt us to disorder our relationship with ourselves, others and God.
Fasting, almsgiving and prayer are the threesome antidotes. The more we fast and prioritize spiritual nourishment over material food, the less vulnerable we will be to being tempted by bread and earthly pleasures.
The more we sacrifice ourselves and our belongings for others’ good, the less prone we will be to giving in to the devil’s seductions to seek power or control over them.
In addition to being a great remedy against the seductions of the Evil One, these three traditional practices are also a great means to help us reorder our relationship to God, our neighbor and appetites.
First, prayer. If God is truly first in our lives, we will want to commit to making the loving dialogue with God our foremost priority.
Rather than squeezing him into our day when we have time, we resolve to center our whole lives on him. Some Lenten resolutions to do this would be to come to daily Mass, “stay awake” with him in Gethsemane through Eucharistic adoration or a daily Holy Hour, pray the Stations of the Cross on Fridays, or try to attend a Lenten mission or retreat.
Second, fasting. Many of us, though believers, live like materialists, laboring harder to stock our refrigerators than to nourish ourselves spiritually.
Fasting helps us to say No to the devil’s temptations to prioritize our stomachs over our souls. It allows us to subordinate our bodily desires and needs to those of the Spirit, to control our desires rather than let them control us. The fast I ordinarily recommend is threefold: to drink mainly water throughout Lent, give up condiments on food (salt, pepper, sugar, butter, ketchup, salad dressing), and forsake sweets and snacks between meals. That’s a type of fast that not only is healthy, but at the end of 40 days will fill you with the discipline that it takes to be a disciple!
Third, almsgiving. Our biggest spiritual cancer often flows from selfishness or egocentrism. That is why the Lord commands us to give alms; to look toward others’ needs, not just our own; to love others in deeds and not just wish them well;  and to take responsibility for others’ welfare, for as often as we fail to do something for them, we fail to care for Christ (Matthew 25:45).
How charitable should we be? We should try to give more than our surplus time or resources, but extend ourselves like the widow with her mite, something that will conform us to Christ’s standard of loving generosity. We should also be deliberate about our charity, not just engaging in “random acts of kindness,” but having a concerted game plan of self-sacrifice, just as Jesus had one toward us from before the world’s foundation.
Like sportspersons having seasonal training to get back to the basics after a monsoon off, so Lent is the time for Christians to get back to the building blocks of a life built on Christ.
Championships often depend on the work done to form the habits that lead to greatness. Catholics would similarly profit from using Lent to jump-start the plan to form the habits that lead to virtue and ultimately to the eternal “Hall of Fame.”

ASH WEDNESDAY AND VALENTINE DAY

               Ash Wednesday and Valentine Day 14th. February 2018

We forget that Valentine’s Day was – and still is – a Catholic feast; that love – including romantic love – is something of God.  In fact, this year is a good opportunity for us Catholics to reclaim Valentine’s Day, to use it as an occasion to remind the world what love really is. We are showing to the world what we have always known and which the world has forgotten: love is all about joyful sacrifice.                                                      As we enter the Lenten season together with our friends and dates, we remind ourselves and others that suffering is the touchstone of love, that the point of penance is not to perform arduous feats of self-denial but to love God and others better, and that with love, suffering is turned into joy. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, and Lent culminates in the commemoration of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ.                                                     History tells us that in the year AD 136, the Roman emperor Hadrian — in efforts to obliterate Christianity — built a temple to Venus, the pagan goddess of love, on the site of the crucifixion of Christ. It took great efforts two centuries later to uncover the True Cross beneath the ruins of the temple to Venus. This Valentine’s Day, and hopefully on every Valentine’s Day after, we can bear witness to the true meaning of love after its supplanting for centuries by a perverted understanding of it. Let us show by our example of joyful sacrifice that we know how to truly love.

ROMANTIC ASH WEDNESDAY

ASH WEDNESDAY AND VALENTINE'S DAY 14th. February 2018

It is an age-old tactic of the devil to exaggerate the hardship entailed by our obligations towards God. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent twisted God’s command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and asked Eve if God prohibited them from eating of any tree in the garden. The devil continues using this tactic to today; thus, for example, we rebel against reasonable guidelines against wearing short skirts and low necklines in church because we perceive these guidelines as requiring us to wrap ourselves in sheets.

The same goes true with the mandatory fasting and abstinence from meat on Ash Wednesday, and warnings against celebrating Valentine’s Day in a sinful fashion. With regard to the former, it is difficult, to be sure, as I can attest from my struggle to practice portion control on ordinary days. But we tend to exaggerate the hardship it entails. We forget that 1) nothing prohibits us from making the allowed full meal for the day a special one, and 2) non-meat dishes can be delicious.

As for the latter, why must we equate celebrating Valentine’s Day with sinful activities?  Why must we assume that certain prohibited activities are the only ways we can celebrate our love – especially our romantic love – on Valentine’s Day?

We forget that Valentine’s Day was – and still is – a Catholic feast; that love – including romantic love – is something of God.  It is true that this year, liturgically speaking, Ash Wednesday takes precedence over the feast of St. Valentine. There’s nothing wrong, too, with scheduling a Valentine’s Day celebration the day before or the day after Ash Wednesday this year. But neither is there any reason we cannot, within the limits imposed by the mandatory forms of penance, celebrate our love on Valentine’s Day this year.

In fact, this year is a good opportunity for us Catholics to reclaim Valentine’s Day, to use it as an occasion to remind the world what love really is. As we take our allowed full one meal on that day in special seafood grills or sushi bars with our dates, perhaps after going to the church together to have ashes imposed on our foreheads or after having spent time together in a wholesome yet no less wonderful way (which we are supposed to do anyway on any other time of the year), we are showing to the world what we have always known and which the world has forgotten: love is all about joyful sacrifice. As we enter the Lenten season together with our dates, we remind ourselves and others that suffering is the touchstone of love, that the point of penance is not to perform arduous feats of self-denial but to love God and others better, and that with love, suffering is turned into joy.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, and Lent culminates in the commemoration of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. History tells us that in the year AD 136, the Roman emperor Hadrian — in efforts to obliterate Christianity — built a temple to Venus, the pagan goddess of love, on the site of the crucifixion of Christ. It took great efforts two centuries later to uncover the True Cross beneath the ruins of the temple to Venus.

This Valentine’s Day, and hopefully on every Valentine’s Day after, we can bear witness to the true meaning of love after its supplanting for centuries by a perverted understanding of it. Let us show by our example of joyful sacrifice that we know how to truly love.

EASTER KNOWING

EASTER KNOWING

            Jesus was not a mythical god whose fabled life was played out in a timeless kingdom. Nor was he merely a first century hippie or Gnostic or social proactivater opposing structures and hierarchies. Those who present Jesus like this are playing down or totalling ignoring his divine sonship and salvation ministry. Jesus Christ was no gaunt, shadowy figure, but a person of flesh and blood, hard as nuts and gentle as the dawn in springtime. He dealt with men and women with unconventional etiquette, and even though they often failed to understand him, he made a great difference to their lives. Seen, heard, felt, and touched, here was someone who was just ordinary yet mysterious, but, in the last instance, worth living and dying for. That was what his disciples finally found out, though they had to go a long way to do so.

            There are touching bits of evidence in the gospel that spin off from the disciples’ pride in their association with Jesus. Well, at least till his arrest and death, when they disintegrated and scrambled for safety. Till much after the resurrection of Jesus the disciples do not come off as recruitment-poster models, flawless and handsome genotypes. The amazing honesty of the gospels is that they avoid sculpting the disciples as heroes in marble. And yet Jesus had planted in their hearts the seeds of transformation, a transformation that was triggered at Pentecost.

The memories of the early Christians, treasured and utilised in their preaching and church life, were precisely those words and works of Jesus that had the power to transform lives. How could they forget the risen Lord breaking into the isolation of the upper room where the disciples huddled in fear, or the hauntingly beautiful Emmaus story ? The New Testament’s bare bones narration of the essential words of Jesus are lean and to the point; they bear the sure traces of countless repetition. Despite the cross  -  the emblem of disastrous and monumental failure  -  the Christian community knew one thing, the most basic fact that they encapsulated and proclaimed in a single powerful phrase: “HE IS RISEN.” This has unceasingly reverberated in a community that has remained unshattered for over 2,000 years.

            It was not faith that created the resurrection, but the resurrection that created the faith. The empty tomb may excite our curiosity as a preliminary, but it is the new presence of Jesus in his community that ignites our faith and feeds our proclamation. The earliest form of Easter preaching was that “he was seen.” People saw him, and it was not a ghost they saw. They not merely saw him, they knew him. Thus a new stage was reached in their relationship with him as against the previous stage of earthly life and death. Jesus did not return to the scene like a bizarrely resuscitated corpse, but had traversed death to a new and transcendent existence, neither this side of the grave nor beyond. He belonged here and yet did not. The disciples had a new knowledge of him but at once found it impossible to “place him” in their mental atlas. It was rather their atlas that took on new contours by this new knowledge, the power of which liberated their hearts from the stranglehold of death. Knowledge is power. Knowing Jesus relativises death and tames it. According to the book of Revelation, Jesus holds the keys of death and Sheol, and he turns the key in the heart of the faithful ones to transform their death and abolish Sheol.

So, who is Jesus Christ ? He is the death-perfected Son of God and man, the source and rationale of the Easter proclamation. And the burning of the heart is the test of authenticity, as is made plain at the end of the profoundly touching Emmaus story. What matters is not so much the emptiness of the tomb as the fullness of the heart, which the Lord promised when he said, “....and it shall be given you in full measure, pressed down and flowing over.” From then on hacks have become heroes, and they can now be cast in gold, silver, and bronze.