The Christ-giving - a Way of Being

WORD 2day: Wednesday, 11th week in Ordinary time

June 18, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 9:6-11; Matthew 6: 1-6,16-18

The Word today continues the discourse of yesterday, about giving... which as we said yesterday, cannot be just an act, but a life style. The readings today go a step further to say, it has to become a way of being, that is the way we think and the way we feel at the deepest core of our being. 

The first reading points to us two most shallow levels of giving. 

First, giving with grudge - it is like some who give, but have within them exactly contrary sentiments, wishing bad for the other, lacking respect for those to whom they give or having a sense of vengeance while giving! This kind of giving is better not done, because it amounts to a sin at the end of it all.

The second type is giving without a choice - it is giving, having to give. If there were an alternative the person would not have rather given. This takes away any merit in the act of giving, although it is good! It has really no value behind it, because it does not come from within, not from a personal choice. 

The Gospel points out another type of shallow giving, which is giving with a hook - this is a very familiar category of giving. Consciously, sub-consciously or even unconsciously, when there is a hook attached to receive directly or indirectly from a giving, that giving cannot still measure up to a Christ-giving.

Christ-giving, giving according to the life style of Christ, is only giving in love! That is what God does and that is what God expects from us. Whether giving the other (in terms of charity), or giving God (in terms of prayer and penance), only when it is done out of love and love alone, it becomes a Christ-like giving and that alone makes us brothers and sisters of that Son who gave himself totally in love. 

The Christ-giving - a lifestyle

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 11th week in Ordinary time

June 17, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 8: 1-9; Matthew 5: 43-48

Continuing to reflect on the Sermon on the mount, today we have reached that place where Jesus teaches us about loving, loving like Christ, loving after the model of God's love - the love that considered only giving - never the conditions involved. In any giving there can be a few conditions involved logically - to whom, to what end, to what extent... and so on. Is that not simple and normal? Jesus breaks all those so-called norms, when he presents God's love as the model of our giving.

God loved us...and gave; gave everything. St. Paul explains that in the passage we read today: Remember how generous the Lord Jesus was: he was rich, but he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty. Love is translated as "giving" and what type of giving? A Christ-giving! It is a life style presented to us by Christ himself - giving without measure, without conditions of deserving or not, and without any assurance of its return in whatever kind. 

That is what he meant when he said, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you! Give, because you wish to give; give because you have a heart to give; give because that is how you life. This is Christ.giving, a life style of love, a love that imitates God who gave everything, Christ who gave everything and the Spirit who gives up everything to reside within us!

Let us pick up this life style, the Christ-giving. 

The Proof for being God's people

WORD 2day: Monday, 11th week in Ordinary time

June 16, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 6: 1-10; Matthew 5: 38-42

pc: universalis.com

The Word today seems to answer the question: how do we prove that we are "God's people"? We claim that identity, and don't we have the onus of living up to it? At times we can gather ourselves us up to say, "yes we do have the responsibility," but only until we hear the teaching of the type we listen to today! Or at least that is what the world at large does... because, the teaching we hear in today's Word, is so unreal and quixotic to say the least, in the eyes of the world.

Being flogged, sent to prison, mobbed, going sleepless, starving... when such situations are affronted with fortitude we prove to be God's people! Our purity, our knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness, truth and righteousness even in the face of disgrace, blame, persecution and suffering, go to prove that we are truly God's people. This is what Paul explains, much in elaboration of what Jesus taught when he said: offer no resistance, show the other cheek, go an extra mile, give even to those who want to take away what is yours!  

Yes, being God's people is being so unrealistc, so impractical... so Christ-like, so God-like. We know what it means - God loved us and continues to love us when we least deserve even the tiniest fraction of the limitless love that God offers us; Christ was willing to die for us, even when we were sinners! We people of this God; we are disciples of this Christ - and what else could be expected of us? 

THE ABC OF HOLY TRINITY

We Are, we Believe and we Cling!

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: June 15, 2025

Proverbs 8: 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16: 12-15

We celebrate the feast of the Holy Trinity today! The Solemnity reminds us of, not only who our God is, but also who we are!

We ARE a communion!

Just as our God is a communion of three persons - Father, Son and the Spirit, we who are created in that image and likeness, are a communion too. We are neither body living in the spirit, nor a spirit residing in the body... we are a being created in such a communion of our natures that we are one, just as the three persons of the trinity are one. It is high time we undid the contrasts between the body and the soul and the mind! We are communion, we ARE Trinity.

We need to continuously grow out of a dichotomous or a segmented life where there is the public life and the private life, the so-called spiritual life and the ordinary life, the life from the Christian point of view and a parallel life of the standards of the world... this is totally contrary to integrity that is truly 'christian'...this integrity can otherwise be known as Communion within a person, an undivided state of life.

We BELIEVE in communion, not in contestation.

The three persons of the Trinity live in communion with each other and there is an eternal self giving that takes place among them, by which they stay as ONE. We believe in communion, dialogue, sharing, sacrifice and selfless service. Only that would make us One people of God.

Today the television channels have fallen into a craze - taking a current issue and calling up people from different camps of thought and making them debate, fight and contest with each other. Worse still, they name the show 'fight' or 'debate' or 'argument', parading the truth that they are more interested in contesting than arriving at a common ground that could promote happiness and fulfillment. The dangerous phenomenon is that the same kind of a mindset enters a family and issues are debated over, contested over but very rarely prayed over and discerned towards communion!

We CLING to the Trinity

In the Trinitarian God we have everything we stand in need of. The Father gives us love and mercy in abundance. The Son gives us the light and truth to live by. The Spirit gives us companionship and good counsel. All that we need to live our life to the full is given by the Trinitarian God. The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are in eternal procession, teaches the Church's theology which means that every one of the three, upholds the other and empties oneself into the others for a unified, generative action.

It may sound a bit too theoretical, but in fact, it is just a life style that would create a paradise on earth wherever we are - if we trust one another and prove trust worthy to each other. That is the message, that we cling to the Trinity not just in asking for favours and fulfilling our needs but in our life style, in our way of relating to the other and making ourselves available to the other, to the community to the entire humanity and even the universe! What a challenging call it is!

As we celebrate this wonderful solemnity, let us take to heart the call and the challenge given to us by the Holy Trinity... to be, to believe and to cling on to the Most Holy Trinity.

Reconciliation: Oneness and Integrity

WORD 2day: Saturday, 10th week in Ordinary time

June 14, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 5: 14-21; Matthew 5: 33-37

The Word today has some oft cited quotes from St. Paul - the love of Christ overwhems us, those who are in Christ are a new creation, for our sake God made the sinless one into sin... all these amounting to that one key experience: reconciliation; that God has reconciled us to Godself in Christ. What does this Reconciliation mean.

The first level of its significance is apparent - very clearly and obviously explained by Paul in his letter: that God has reconciled us to Godself, non holding our faults against us! This is the oneness that God has effected, wanting is to be One with God - Reconciliation is that oneness with God, that belonging to God, that unity with God, which is a crucial meaning of salvation. 

There is yet another level of significance that this reconciliation can have - the reconciliation that is from within. When Paul declares, those who are in Christ are new creation, he insists upon this reconciliation, that we are reconciled within us, that we have no duplicity within us, that we have nothing within us that sports conflict. As Jesus explains in the Gospel - when we wish to mean yes, we say yes; and when we say no, we mean no! That is reconciliation, a simplicity that can be called Integrity. 

Integrity is a key element of new creations in Christ, the creations, the beings, the persons who have nothing that is in conflict within, or with anything else! There is this perfect harmony that can be a great spiritual experience, the unparalleled experience of salvation, a Reconciliation from within. When God reconciles us with Godself, we are called to grow into reconciled beings from within, persons of integrity - that shall indeed be a sign of the Ambassadors for Christ. 

An Absolute Choice for God - countering adultery anyday!

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

June 13, 2025 - Celebrating St. Anthony of Padua

2 Corinthians 4: 7-15; Matthew 5: 27-32

To a curious mind it would be important to insist that the etymology of "adult" and "adultery" are certainly not the same... because the tendency today is to justify adultery as an ambit of adults, a way of life for the adults to decide - that is a risky moral decadence! 

The Word today invites us to reflect on our call to refrain from adultery. Hence it becomes pertinent to answer the question, what is adultery? Is it merely an act of biological, physiological, sexual aberration in persons? Yes, and no. Yes, because it is so literally. No, because it is not merely that, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel today. That takes us to the etymology that we were speaking of earlier. 

Adultery as we know comes from the two terms - "ad" and "alterare" which mean respectively towards and altering... it is doing something towards altering the original nature of something - adulterating. 

We are created in the image and likeness of God and whatever leads us towards altering that nature of ours, is an adultery - be it seeing, hearing, doing, going or whatever. And Jesus tells us - find out what is that which makes you alter your course in life, making you move away from being children of God, remove it at its root and you shall grow to be a true son or daughter of God! 

But is it really possible for us to do? We are weak, fragile, and conditioned...precisely in this earthenware has the Lord placed the precious divine image and likeness! How carefully we need to care for it! That is our Christian vocation. It requires an unquestioning recognition and uncompromising appreciation of the treasure that we have inside and the call to preserve it. That is called an Absolute Choice for God. St. Antony whom we celebrate today, lived a life that was an incomparable witness to this Choice for God - in everything, in every way. That is the only way to counter adultery any day!

Pride, Prejudice and Presumption

WORD 2day: Thursday, 10th week in Ordinary time

June 12, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 3:15 - 4:1, 3-6; Matthew 5: 20-26

The Word today warns us of the veils, the veils that can obstruct us from beholding the Lord, listening to the voice of the Lord and seeing the Lord in action right amidst us. 

We are  presented with the two dominant veils that hinders humanity from observing something so obvious, the presence of God in this world - the veil of pride and prejudice! Pride that fills me so much with me, myself and mine, that I do not see the other, the world, the humanity or anything other than me. Prejudice is that opinion I have about the other which makes me blind to other, absent to the other, apathetic to the other and some times even a threat to the other, that I fail to see the other, the real other. All that I see is my opinion of the other. 

As a consequence of these veils, the pride within me and the prejudice about the other, I am lost in presumption and I think, I am all that I need to have a meaningful life on this earth! What a folly, a folly that is slowly and steadily taking over the entire humanity, in the name of scientificity, autonomy, self sufficiency and technocracy! 

The only remedy that we can foresee, is our docility to the Spirit, to the Spirit who penetrates our hearts as the light of the Lord, the voice of the Lord, the finger of the Lord that touches and brings us to life, to light and to the truth - that we may see beyond the veils of pride and prejudice and see our brothers and sisters, their dignity and the gift that they are, with the love with which the Lord has loved us: and we shall behold the Lord, here and now!

Being Sources of Encouragement

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

June 11, 2025: Celebrating St. Barnabas, the Apostle of Encouragement
Acts 11: 2b-126, 13: 1-3; Matthew 10: 7-13

The spirit of the Reign is a spirit of encouragement and empowerment, it cannot be merely cynicism and critique. Barnabas stood for this spirit of the Reign, and that was the reason the apostles named him so - the term meaning 'son of encouragement' (cf. Acts 4:36).

Some characteristics that stand out in Barnabas are his relentless passion for proclamation, his courage to brave all odds, his capacity for being sincere even to the extent of having confrontations with his close friend, Paul (Acts 15). What mattered to them, be it Paul or Barnabas, was the Message of God be announced and the Reign of God be made present; neither their personal likes or dislikes nor their ego demands affect their mission in anyway!

Reflecting on the great apostle we celebrate today, we have some lessons that he offers us:

1. Build up persons, that is the way to build up the Reign of God. Look at the way he brough Paul to the other apostles and stood by him and other messengers of the Lord.

2. Be faithful to the Lord, with a firm heart, that is the way to belong to the Reign. The life of Barnabas shows the way he renounced everything for the sake of the call that he had received - a firm heart that remained ever faithful to God.

3. Rejoice in the matters of the Lord, that is the way to invite people to the Reign. We can observe the amount of satifaction that Barnabas has when people converted themselves and were prepared to accept the salvific message of Christ.

Be encouraged, and be an encouragement to the others... that is the crux of the message today. May the apostle of encouragement we celebrate today, St. Barnabas intercede for us that we may be filled with the Spirit of encouragement and empowerment, thus being ourselves sources of encouragement wherever we are.

The Spirit and Truth - the task of the Reign

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 10th week in Ordinary time

June 10, 2025 - 2 Corinthians 1: 18-22; Matthew 5: 13-16

There is salt and there is the salt that has lost its taste - they look the same, but they are absolutely not the same. The difference is like the light and darkness, the difference is stark. That is how it is with an yes and anything other than that, says the Word today. 

We are living in a post-truth era, the social philosophers say. There is no more absolute truth in the eyes of the world - everything seems relative. There are only the logics and proofs to establish and truth is seconded to all these documented narratives. No one can be certain of which is the right narrative or the wrong one; in fact, there is only the loudest or the strongest narrative by now for the consumption. There are other narratives that are made voiceless and drowned in the lie. 

The danger is that this phenomenon gets replicated within each of us... that is, we allow the falsities within us take over our real selves so much that at a point of time, we ourselves do not know which is our real self and which is fake! That is the tasteless salt, at times poisonous salt - spreading not light but darkness! 

It is only the Spirit of the Lord who can keep us from this danger, protect us from this darkness, because the Spirit is Light, and those who are in the Spirit are in the light! We are called to be light and salt in this world, bearing witness to the truth - that is the task of the Reign. 

The Eve of Salvation

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

June 9, 2025 - Feast of Mary, Mother of the Church
Genesis 3: 9-15,20; John 19: 25-34

The Mother of the New born Church - that is whom we celebrate today. Mary was given as the Mother of, the Church to be born after the Son of God accomplished his earthly mission and the Spirit of the Lord came down to continue the mission in and through the Church. The two readings that we have today in the liturgy of the Word, explains to us how this mystery unfolds - we can reflect that with the following three instances.

1. The First Eve - the woman who was given

Eve was the mother of all those who lived... that is how Adam named her! She was given to him and that is why he says, 'the woman you gave me...' However, Eve was used by the evil one, she became an instruments at the hands of the tempter, bringing the opportunity of sin and perdition into the world, according to the Biblical account. She signalled the weakness that we possess as human persons in looking to do things on our own, despite the loving ways the Lord cares for us.

2. The Second Eve - the woman who gave herself

In contrast we are presented with another woman... one who gave herself to God - behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your will. The tendency to do things on our own, the tendency to have our will, is countered by the readiness with which she surrenders herself to God and God's salvific plan. Just as God gave Adam a woman, do does God give this woman to the humankind and for the salvation of the humankind, as God prepares to send the Saviour through her.

3. The Eve of Salvation - the mother who was given

Just as God gave Eve to Adam and Mary to humanity as the new Eve, Jesus the Lord gives his mother as the Mother of all who would believe in him: behold your mother! Mary is given as the mother of the Church, the redeemed people of God, the chosen disciples of Christ, the people constituted into a Church by the infilling of the Holy Spirit. And Mary was there - just as she was there when the Creator was born into a fragile little child, also when the fragile little flock was made into a mighty people of God by the coming of the Spirit.

We gratefully remember today, late Pope Francis who added this beautiful element to our Faith tradition... celebrating the Mother of us all, as celebrated always by the Church and in the Church - the Eve of Salvation, the hope of the people of God. May our Blesssed Mother continue to walk with the pilgrim Church, pray with the Church and protect the Church on this pilgrimage towards Reign of God.