Monthly Archives: August 2017

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
Isaiah 22:19-23 | Psalm 137(138):1-3,6,8 | Romans 11:33-36 | Matthew 16:13-20

Your love, O Lord, is eternal:
discard not the work of your hands. (Psalm 138:8)

Yesterday, I finally returned to my primary school, 37 years after I graduated.

I was at St. Joseph’s Institution Junior for the archdiocese New Wine 2017 conference, but to me, it will forever be St. Michael’s School.

Sicut Michael Semper, indeed.

All the old familiar buildings are long gone, replaced by a spanking new campus that has a charm all its own.

Oddly, that neatly reflected one of the peripheral themes of the conference: No more “business as usual”.

It’s a perennial danger faced by all Catholics. We pray the same prayers over and over, perform the same actions over and over, and thereby sink into the same rut of faith over and over, neither blazing with belief nor rejecting the Lord entirely.

St. John had a disturbing revelation about God’s reaction to such Catholics:

I know all about you: how you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other, but since you are neither, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth. (Rev 3:15-16)

We need to guard against such middle-of-the-road meanderings. It confirms something I’ve begun to implement in my life: Don’t Get Comfy In Faith.

I know I need to challenge myself every day, to not slip into “auto-prayer” mode, to focus in contemplation, to risk both silent and public scorn to share my faith in both word and deed.

For as Dr. Scott Hahn noted in his book Evangelizing Catholics:

You can’t keep the faith until you give it away.

The love of the Lord is never-changing because it is perfect.

We humans need to keep polishing.

Amen.

Wednesday of week 20 in Ordinary Time (Year I)
Judges 9:6-15 | Psalm 20(21):2-7 | Matthew 20:1-16

It’s quite obvious by now that my daily commitment to writing about each day’s scripture has fallen by the wayside. I draw a blank on most nights in recent memory, so I set the task aside till the dawn, whereupon I either end up busying myself with something else, or sit down and draw another blank. Blanks are really no fun to draw.

Do I feel like I’m letting God down? Kinda.

Do I feel like a failure? Oh yes.

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Then last evening, as I was shopping for groceries, an odd sight nearly made me laugh out loud:

The price of failure?!?!

Just a simple electronic price tag, with a mocking message:

You arrogant fool! You think you’re a great failure? I’ve got news for you: everybody fails! So you missed a few days’ scriptural blogging, well big whoop! Keep on keepin’ on, I say!

(That was actually all in my head, but you get the idea…)

It’s a timely reminder to keep my eyes firmly fixed on the God who’s both far in the distance and right in front of me.

The God who knows I’ve failed, but also knows I’m willing to keep coming back.

The God who loves me enough to send me very unusual messages.

As long as I keep my eyes firmly fixed on Him, I can more-or-less avoid the grievous error of the Shechem elders in today’s scripture, who in electing Abimelech king would later regret their terrible choice.

Lord God, You are King of my heart. Let me never turn away from You, even in my direst moments, and especially not in the times of great success. May I always look to You in joy and in sorrow, in trial and in ease, salve for the wounded present and hope for the glorious future. For in You alone do I live, and move, and have my being. Amen.

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And as the lights go out at the basement supermarket, a forlorn voice is heard:

OK, message sent. Now can someone please fix me?

Anyone?

Hello?

Wednesday of week 19 in Ordinary Time (Year I)
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 | Psalm 65(66):1-3,5,16-17 | Matthew 18:15-20

The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, saying: I will give it to your descendants. I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross into it.’ (Deuteronomy 34:4)

Of late, I’ve been dreaming of failure.

I dream of building a successful business, only to be ousted by the company board.

I dream of running towards a young boy standing in the middle of the road, only to watch helplessly as he tumbles over a speeding car into a crumpled motionless heap.

I dream of standing in the middle of Raffles Place, proclaiming the end times to a never-ending flock of financial types blithely flitting past, minds lost in plotting their next market killing.

I wonder where all this failure is coming from.

Ow.

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Moses failed in his success.

He led the Israelites to the Promised Land, but he did not trust in God enough to ask the rock at Meribah to yield its life-giving waters. Instead, he struck it twice, and in his disobedience, he was barred from entering himself. (Numbers 20:1-13)

Yet Moses, to this day, is still considered one of the greatest and most widely-acknowledged of all the prophets.

He also succeeded each time he trusted in the Lord. The Book of Exodus is filled with accounts of the miracles he was involved with.

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I think my dreams weren’t actually about failure.

I may have lost my business, but it survived.

I may not have been able to save that child, but I didn’t hesitate to try.

I may not have been able to convert hearts, but I didn’t fear to take the stand for the Lord.

Instead, they were a reminder that my own abilities are limited, but there is something greater in this world, emanating from someone who beckons to me and points the way every day, the right race to run.

That something…is faith.

Not the fickleness of human desires.

Not the ever-changing measures of secular success.

Just the quiet voice that reminds us in the silence:

Trust in the Lord, and do what He commands.
Unto Him give the first fruits of your heart.
When all has crumbled into dust, He will remain.
He will raise you up in the palm of His hand.

Amen.

The Transfiguration of the Lord
Daniel 7:9-10,13-14 | Psalm 96(97):1-2,5-6,9 | 2 Peter 1:16-19 | Matthew 17:1-9

Travel can be a stressful time, bringing out the worst in us.

I rediscovered this during my just-concluded two-week trip, a medical-business-pleasure jaunt with my oldest friend and another friend whom we’ve both known for years. We both appreciate this other friend for her project management abilities, but she’s a harridan in face-to-face interaction, and not one to use ten words when she could come up with 10,000.

This is not the first trip the three of us have taken together, but it’s the first one that both of us blew up at her. I’m usually the peacemaker between the other two, but this time I found myself getting increasingly irritated at what I thought was irrationality and unnecessary volubility hitting all-time highs.

I finally lost my cool when I asked her for directions to the medical centre that I was driving her to…and she responded with a torrent of words that left both of us thoroughly confused as to where she wanted us to drop her off. We were in the middle of fast-flowing traffic, so I YELLED at her to get to the point.

That startled my buddy, who later explained that she was particularly edgy this year because she was deathly concerned with her steadily-increasing weight, despite all other medical checkups finding her in better-than-normal health for her age.

Cancer was not far from her mind.

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This Sunday, we recall the Transfiguration of the Lord, the moment when His interior divinity emerged with unquestionable glory, confounding the apostles with him.

We too experience many moments of “transfiguration” in our lives, in which our inner selves make themselves known in unguarded moments, despite our best efforts to hide them from others:

making a mess when we eat, and blithely leaving the detritus behind for the busy cleaners to deal with…

or respect the “please clear your table” signs and bus our plates and bowls…

briefly looking up on the train to see a senior citizen standing before us, then quickly looking down to pretend we hadn’t noticed…

or give them our seat and spend the next three stops standing with nary a load on our backs…

having second thoughts about the pair of jeans we picked out 10 minutes ago, and dropping them off on the nearest available shelf—among the pots and pans in the household section…

or head back down a floor and return the neatly-folded clothes to the place we found them…

What do these revealing moments say about us, and what we profess to believe?

Lord, open our eyes to our own moments of transfiguration, and help us understand how they reflect our own values and beliefs despite our pretensions to righteousness. May our words and actions always reflect the radiance of Your own Transfiguration, and lead others in our own small way to You and to our heavenly Father. Amen.