Our Spiritual Journey!

Some of our journeys in life have no sense of direction or destination. This pastor began to preach the homily when suddenly two men came with machine guns one in front and one at the back of the church. The man in the front spoke up, “Those who want to take a bullet for Jesus remain in your seats.” Within seconds the people ran for their lives including the assistant priests. Only 20 or more people were left in the church. The man spoke again, “Ok Father! The hypocrites have all gone, please begin your homily.” If our spiritual journey is not planned we would not have any goals to achieve in life.

One of the parables for the religious educators narrated by Fr. Anthony De Mello is that of a sheep found a hole in the fence and crept through it and wandered far off and lost his way back. Then he realized that he was being followed by a wolf. He ran and ran, but the wolf kept chasing him, until the shepherd came and rescued him and brought him back to the fold. In spite of everyone’s urgings to the contrary, the shepherd refused to nail up the hole in the fence. God respects us and gives us freedom to choose. Life is full of choices. God’s love is the freedom we enjoy in choosing.

Magi Caspar from Tarsus, Melchior from Arabia and Balthazar from Sheba were to come together as a unit, a community. This unity from different backgrounds sometimes opposing backgrounds were not work of people. The 12 disciples of Jesus and their differences so unique but in the presence of Jesus could work together. Husbands and wives coming from different family backgrounds, mindsets, and other numerous differences were joined in marriage by God. Begins the journey of life: to search for meaning, to search for happiness, to search for inner peace and love.

We all need a Star to guide us on our way. It could be the power of the Bible, Marian devotion, Daily Eucharist, Power of the sacraments or just a simple personal prayer, but we all need some form of spirituality for our day-to-day sustenance. Most of our wandering and losing ways could be avoided through this.

We all will experience a TIME WITH HEROD. Most lives confusion starts there. All the violation of the commandments, all the power and glory of the nature of God’s love will be blurry or even diminished and forgotten. Temptations rule us. Power of sin takes possession of us. We decide whatever we see and hear are facts and truth. We don’t ask God to guide us to the truth. Our hasty decisions were about to bury us alive! But God still guides us through all those confusions.

After numerous attempts, struggles, trials and temptations, we find God. We realize the importance of giving in the presence of God. Myrrh is a symbol of human vulnerability. It is symbolic of the humanity of Jesus. Like us, he experienced joy, sorrow, fear, frustration, loneliness. The gift of incense is symbolic of the divinity of Jesus. Gold is an ideal gift for a King. The ideal king led by love. Epiphany is after all realizing that we should have something to give to God. It is not just the epiphany of God, rather our own epiphanies.

The more we bring the best in us to the benefit of the other and God, the more we are blessed with the wisdom and love of God. Wise men were guided by the Wisdom of God. Wise men would have spoilt the whole salvation history. They would have killed Jesus. After all the wisdom of man is never enough when it comes to loving other and loving God.

Where am I going? What am I searching for in life? What are my Herod-times? Do I feel the need to model my own Epiphany with that of Jesus? How wise am I? Do I value God’s wisdom as an anchor in my spirituality and way of life?

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New Year Resolutions!

I have been checking on the most common New Year resolutions around us: It’s always been Lose Weight, Manage Debt, Save Money, and Get fit, Quit Smoke or Drink. "People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas."

In a way, New Year is everyone’s birthday. New Year is a special time to reflect on God’s generosity. It is a time to be happy that God gave us enough and more opportunities to share His love and care with different people. Rarely do we admit that ‘Time’ belongs to God and our bodies are timed. God is beyond time, but He loves us in time. Every opportunity that we get on earth to show our love, faith, care, responsibility is special and important to us. Wasting, ignoring or being indifferent to those opportunities is equal to saying no to time, thus God’s generosity.

We read in the 1st reading one of the finest blessings in the OT. We need God’s grace & blessings every day to keep our time holy and God-filled. It makes us to act fast on love: the shepherds went in haste. We cannot afford to idle away in experiencing the grace and blessings of God. It compels us to reach out; to seek the face of God in others. It should make us restless. St. Augustine experienced that: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” God’s gift of time is an invitation to seek His Face, His Kingdom. Mary as mother of God experienced the restlessness in her heart. The agony and ecstasy she had to go through in her continued efforts to fulfill God’s will never missed to affect her Son in the womb. Jesus was not only sharing her blood as nourishment, but also her spirituality, her restlessness and her rejoicing in the Lord in time. It took her and Joseph eight days to call the baby ‘Jesus’. Those eight days were great days of preparation - a desert experience – longing to call the baby ‘Jesus’ a name meaning Savior.

God creates us in time, gives us necessary grace and blessings to make our time holy by the way we live. Today as we reflect on the response of Mary to the call of God, on how she made all efforts to make her time holy, let us reflect on our own response to the call of God: our call to be a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a grandparent, a friend and a child of God and a child of Mary. This will lead us to pray for our country, our world and its peace. We need peace to purify our time. Today is a special day traditionally we pray for World Peace. Pope JP II said, “To pray for peace is to open the human heart to the inroads of God’s power to renew all things. To pray for peace is to pray for Justice, for a right-ordering or relations within and among nations and peoples. It is to pray for freedom of every individual. It is to seek God’s forgiveness, and to implore the courage to forgive those who have trespassed against us.”

Mary is the model of the Church and a great source of inspiration to all of us. By remembering her faithfulness to God, we live out her values and inspiration all the days of this year and the years to come. Let us make all our God-given time holy following the example of Mary, the Mother of God. Amen.

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Christmas Tree

Christmas for Christians is a day of gratitude. Gratitude leads us to prayer, where our hearts are filled with wonder and praise. Christmas leads us to the sense of wonder. God presents himself as tiny, fragile, vulnerable, and dependent compared to the strong, muscular, powerful, parenting and patronizing people we are in front of God. We often see parents and friends finding similarities between the child and parents. This child Jesus not just resembles certain features, rather is the ultimate replica of God the Father. This child is not a super child in any way: it cries, smiles, holds our fingers, and kicks legs to show excitement. Christmas makes us wonder in a new way. God so weak and vulnerable is asleep with his creation which is strong and powerful.

If there is no Christmas, we would not have experienced this sense of wonder at all: we would have missed touching his soft little cheeks, fingers and toes; missed to see him sleep peacefully, see him cry, see him reach out to him mom, his confused looks and his innocence. This brings in a great lesson of all time: to reach at the cave of one’s heart, one must become childlike. A child has a great power to make us focus our attention completely whoever we are, whatever degrees we hold. God not only became childlike, God became a child. This proves that God will go all the way, take any risk, sacrifice any level, and give up anything to reach the cave of our hearts.

Concentrate on the Christmas trees: Let us divide the tree into three parts: The base, the middle and the top. The base is well set. Everyone is given the opportunity to witness God’s revelation. God initiated this love. God continuously sends us signals and reveals his heart to us in million ways. The base is so big and large like the heart of God. Our spiritual journey begins when we fully accept and appreciate that we are chosen and loved by God. Gradually we try to understand and feel the importance of God in our lives: thus we begin to respond. Through words (prayer) and deeds (Works of charity). We respond to God’s call by our faith, hope and love. There will be dry leaves and dry branches of our inability to grasp the message of God and also our lack of commitment to live in the presence of God. Continual efforts on our response to God’s love make us grow spiritually and holistically. As we climb higher we become aware that we are so tiny and powerless, so fragile, confused and weak. But that is the moment God comes near to us. We experience the nearness of the Star: The star that shows the beauty of the tree, the star that illumines every nook and corner of the tree, like God fills our body and soul through the Eucharist. That is the message of Christmas: People experience the physical and spiritual nearness of God.

Do I have a Christmas tree? How does it look like? Through my selfishness and irreligious attitudes, I have cut the branches of the base off; I never listened to the revelation of God in my life. I have cut down all the branches in the middle that I vowed never to have faith, hope and love in my life. By cutting down the new growth, I have said good-bye to the Star! Dear friends! God gives us another chance! Look! A new shoot is coming up! And you can’t stop them! Merry Christmas!

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