Monthly Archives: April 2016

Saturday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 16:1-10 | Psalm 99:1-3, 5 | John 15:18-21

[Paul and Timothy] travelled through Phrygia and the Galatian country, having been told by the Holy Spirit not to preach the word in Asia. When they reached the frontier of Mysia they thought to cross it into Bithynia, but as the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them, they went through Mysia and came down to Troas. (Acts 16:6-8)

It might seem odd at first that the Holy Spirit would stand in the way of Christian evangelism, particularly with such a erudite and persuasive apostle at the helm. A modern COO making a similar corporate decision would probably be summarily dismissed for gross incompetence.

However, Christianity did spread even to the areas skipped by this missionary juggernaut, so we can only conclude that God’s plan for Asia Minor and Bithynia did not include St. Paul. To his credit, he yielded to the Spirit’s urgings, turning his attention to Macedonia and continental Europe, returning eventually to Asia Minor at a later date.

Too, my early childhood plans involved joining the priesthood, no doubt inspired by the great personage that was Fr. Louis Fossion. Obviously, those plans fell to matrimony and secular work, but I still serve the Lord in ministry, and the day may yet come when I join the clergy. In the meantime, I’ll continue to let the Spirit guide my blog entries, and perhaps take some inspiration thereof on future life directions.

Something to ponder, dear reader: Has the Spirit thrown up unexpected roadblocks in your path? In what direction is the Spirit tugging you now? How are you responding to its urgings?

Lord, open our hearts to your Spirit, our ears to your Holy Word, and our hands and feet to your continuing work here on earth. Amen.

Friday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 15:22-31 | Psalm 56:8-12 | John 15:12-17

I shall not call you servants any more,
because a servant does not know
his master’s business.
I call you friends,
because I have made known to you
everything I have learnt from my Father.
(John 15:15)

The master-disciple dynamic is a staple of kung fu movies, ranging from the mind-numbing “wax on, wax off” inculcation of personal discipline, to the wise shifu who holds back an important move from his wayward disciple, so that the inevitable coup d’etat comes to a crippling end for the usurper.

The latter scenario tends to prevail across the world today. Many mentors hold back on vital information to protect their position viz. their charges, no doubt inspired by the above movies and others which depict a gory end to generous teachers. The feeling of “power through superior knowledge” is also exceedingly seductive. If I don’t tell you everything you need to know, so the conventional wisdom goes, I can ensure that you’ll never threaten my status.

It’s a rare tutor who willingly imparts the sum total of his knowledge to his students, bringing them to equal status with himself. As the only Son of God and the incarnation of divinity on earth, Jesus could have upheld the “bow down before my magnificence, unworthy mortals” dynamic, but He chose not to.

It was Jesus who imparted to His disciples the totality of God’s love, and to us through them, in a simplified and more attainable form.

It was Jesus who stooped to wash the feet of his own disciples, showing by example the relationship we should adopt with each other: not suffering servants to overbearing overlords but eucharistic (thanks-giving) equals.

And it was Jesus who plumbed the depths of agape, the total and unconditional love that God has for His creation, by acting on His own exhortations to love and giving up His life for all mankind.

✞ ✞ ✞ ✞ ✞

When I began my freelancing consulting almost 20 years ago, many people warned me about revealing too much about my methods, so as not to give away my competitive advantage. They’d often supplement their exhortations with horror stories about customers who repurposed staff training and other deliverables of consulting contracts to eventually put their creators out of business.

It was my oldest and best friend, an atheist with a heart more Christ-like than most, who urged me not to adopt such a selfish attitude. He had a rather interesting justification, too: “If you keep holding on to your position and purpose with a death-grip, how would you be able to let go and move on when the world changes?”

There’s even less reason to selfishly cling on to our knowledge of God. After all, living in the love of the Lord isn’t a zero-sum game; I increase my “love bounty” by sharing it with others, not hoarding it for myself. It’s similar in a sense to a concept in my daily work called open-source software, in which freely exposing the inner workings of my software benefits others by their increased knowledge, but it also benefits me by the knowledge I gain in turn from others’ willingness to open their source code, as well as additional “eyes” on my work to detect issues that I would not have discovered on my own, and otherwise make necessary improvements.

So if, dear reader, you see something incongruous or simply wrong in my daily sharings, please do point them out in the comments. We can all benefit from critical examination of our individual faith. Thanks much!

Lord, do not let us withhold the fruits of Your love from others. Remind us every day to share our knowledge of You and of our Father, so that others may come to know and love You too. Amen.

Thursday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 15:7-21 | Psalm 95:1-3, 10 | John 15:9-11

Today’s reading showcases an aspect of the early church that resonates to this day: the fascination with rules and regulations.

The Mosaic Law that the Pharasaic Christians wanted to impose on their new Gentile brethren is pretty much impossible for a typical person to keep in its entirety. The Catechism of the Catholic Church characterises it thus:

According to Christian tradition, the Law is holy, spiritual, and good, yet still imperfect. Like a tutor it shows what must be done, but does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it. Because of sin, which it cannot remove, it remains a law of bondage. (CCC 1963)

Peter himself admits his own inability to “keep up his side of the old bargain,” as it were:

It would only provoke God’s anger now, surely, if you imposed on the disciples the very burden that neither we nor our ancestors were strong enough to support? (Acts 15:10)

Instead, Jesus introduced a New Law of the Gospel, one founded on charity and perfection of one’s heart towards others, whose fundamental precept is so simple that every Christian knows it by heart: “Love one another as I have loved you.” (It also happens to be the base message in today’s gospel.)

Yet too many Christians still cling to the old foundations of “thou shalt/shalt not” as the basis of their faith-in-practice. Sure, it seductively eliminates the need for careful pondering about the why of what we do/don’t, but it also opens the floodgates to rules lawyering:

• “Mother Church only encourages us to receive Holy Communion once a year at Easter, so see you next year!”
• “Pirating software is not stealing! I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, so the vendor didn’t lose any income. Why you so ngeow one?!?!”
• “How can it be adultery if we’re not even married? Anyway, she refused me, so I gotta find my sex elsewhere, no?”
• “If I abstain from meat on Fridays, can I eat lobster and caviar instead?”

(I didn’t make any of the above up; they were all uttered in my presence over the past decade.)

This prompted a Muslim programmer friend’s highly jaundiced observation with regards to “God’s versioning of religion”:

v1.0 – Judaism: Prescriptions and proscriptions galore, so you knew what to do to be good in God’s eyes.
Bugs found: No mortal human could follow all 613 rules religiously.

v2.0 – Christianity: Simplify, simplify, simplify. Charity and love. Trust believers to do right by God.
Bugs found: Too many preferred the old “tell me what I can/cannot do” rigidity. Others took lots of liberties in their new-found freedom. Still others simply stopped caring.

v3.0 – Islam: Basically v1.0, with refinements.
Bugs found: Too similar to v1.0, practitioners on both sides go to war over trivialities.

It’s really quite blasphemous, but there’s enough truth in his description of Christianity-as-practised to burn like acid on bare skin.

✞ ✞ ✞ ✞ ✞

Jesus gave us a new commandment not because the old ones were wrong, but because a heart full of love for one’s neighbor can better adapt to changing circumstances (any oxen in Singapore for me to covet?) and continue to uphold the Holy Spirit of the Law. And no, that wasn’t a pun:

The New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit given to the faithful through faith in Christ. (CCC 1966)

As Christians, we really should lay off “nitpicking over loopholes” and focus more on “what can I do for my neighbour today?”

Lord, send the Holy Spirit upon us, and kindle in us the fire of your love, that we in turn may set others’ hearts on fire with the immensity and infinity of Your Love for all creation. Amen.

Wednesday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 15:1-6 | Psalm 121:1-5 | John 15:1-8

I can’t be the only person who noticed a “severing with sharp instruments” theme running through today’s texts, from Jesus’ allusions to removing deadwood and pruning for better yield, to “thou shalt have thy foreskin removed to be followers of Christ”.

Last evening, I realised that I had been spending WAY too much time online each night, even though a lot of it was spent doing research for this blog. (Really.)

So I cut out most of that, and spent a couple of hours catching up on the nightly news and some cooking shows with my wife. She was greatly pleased at my sudden shower of attention, and I was entertained by some rather clumsy knife work by a local celebrity. Serendipity, or God’s plan? I await your incisive comments.

✞ ✞ ✀ ✞ ✞

We all have at least one thing we could stand to cut out from our daily lives, from excessive drinking to all-night gaming, from food porn to…the other kind. Regular fasting and abstinence reminds us of the “less is more” aphorism: fewer distractions to a deeper realisation of God’s bounty of love. Tomorrow may see the return of “deep research”, but at least today’s entry sprang effortlessly from my mind, like blood from sliced raw meat.

On second thought, that image should probably have been left on the cutting room floor.

Lord, give us the courage to remove anything that distracts us from Your Way, Your Truth and Your Life, and to help others do the same. Amen.

Tuesday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 14:19-28 | Psalm 144:10-13, 21 | John 14:27-31

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. (John 14:27)

There was certainly little peace during my train journey home last night. Thanks to a power fault that seemed to have simultaneously crippled four separate train lines, it took several hours, in slow-moving trains crammed with frustrated commuters.

Even as I was listening to the Pascha episode of the Catholic Stuff You Should Know podcast, I could hear the angry buzzing around me. Many passengers made loud calls to their loved ones complaining about the delay, while Twitter and other social media showed clear displays of serious unhappiness. Even though the train I was riding in suffered no power outages, the continued illumination and cool air did little to calm most people’s nerves over our unexpectedly long pauses in between stations, and more than a few expletives were publicly directed at our local train operator. I can only imagine how much worse it was for the commuters on the other lines, who were completely deprived of lighting and air-conditioning.

Peace may have been in short supply yesterday, but as I listened to the podcast and read today’s gospel while “sardined” in the train, I did find it. My dinner may have been greatly delayed, to my stomach’s displeasure, but I was otherwise untroubled by biological imperatives (particularly the Pee and Poopy Show), and I managed to compose this entire blog entry in my head after I ran out of podcast.

So the Lord’s peace did indeed descend upon me as I mentally distracted myself with His Holy Word during this trying journey, and while I might not have left my stop with the disturbing grin I mentioned yesterday, I wasn’t muttering dark imprecations either. I highly recommend keeping a bible app on your cellphone, or just browse the day’s readings online when inconvenience or strife hits you. With scripture’s proven ability to calm frayed nerves and lower blood pressure, the life you thus save may well be your own.

That said, I will start mentally plotting alternate bus “escape hatches” along my daily routes. I have already forgiven this disruption, but I’d be a fool to forget.

Lord, you have been our salvation and our hope from age to age. Remind us to seek You out especially when we are troubled, draw inner peace in the midst of earthly turmoil, and share that peace with the ones around us where possible. Amen.