Defining Spiritual Persons

WORD 2day: Wednesday, 22nd week in Ordinary time

September 2, 2020: 1 Corinthians 3: 1-9; Luke 4: 38-44

Paul feels bad about the fact that he is not able to speak to the Corinthians as to Spiritual people, because of jealousy, rivalry and division among them. He presents those predicaments as directly opposed to being spiritual people. Jesus in the Gospel shines as a role model in being a Spiritual person or a person of the Spirit. He heals, casts out demons and refuses to gain any popularity mileage out of it. He rebukes the demons even, not to announce his Christ image, as he wants himself to be experienced in the depths of their hearts, by each one hearing him or following him. 

Are jealousy, rivalry and other divisive mentalities totally absent today in faith communities?  Interdenominational differences, intra-community differences withing even the Catholic faith communities are not rare things we hear about. Leave alone the communities, what about my heart, is it totally free of it? If not, I still am an immature believer, yet to become truly a Spiritual person.

St. Paul, in a way, defines who a spiritually mature person is: one who is integral in his or her outlook, unifying in his or her relationships, loving in his or her consideration of the other and God-centered in his or her understanding of one's own identity and of the identity of the faith community. If I am still living two lives - one formal and external and the other personal and hidden, if I am divisive and discriminatory in my thinking, words and choices, if I tend to look at the other with suspicion as a threat or a burden, if I am filled with my ego and closed to the others, the Spirit has not yet taken possession of me fully.

Spiritual Persons are persons of the Spirit, and what matters to them is the action of the Spirit within themselves and within their communities. 

To have the Mind of Christ

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 22nd week in Ordinary time

September 1, 2020: 1 Corinthians 2: 10b-16 ; Luke 4: 31-37.

They believed firmly that no human being can ever deserve the love of God. All that one can do is live in fear of the wrath of God and live a righteous life in order to avoid punishment. Jesus turns those tables upside down and makes it clear that one need not deserve to be loved... God loves us not because we deserve; but because God loves! God loves us and that is all that matters. 

In his own self Jesus demonstrated how God is close to every human person and how compassionately in love God is, with God's own children. It is not about begging God for love, but it is about claiming that love with authority that comes from the very fact that we are sons and daughters of that loving God. God does not want us to beg for God's love, but to live a life that would enable us to feel that love which is always and gratuitously given in abundance. 

At times it can happen that we may take this concept for an advantage. "Claiming with the right of the children"... we have to remember obviously that it first requires that we live as true sons or daughters, knowing our duties and our obligations, our priorities and pertaining choices! We have all the time during the lockdown to sleep, socialise and do our work from home, but when it come to participating in a prayer moment, be it Eucharistic Celebration or a Rosary service or something similar, we find it difficult, inconvenient and highly impossible! Being children is not merely a right, it has an intrinsic duty attached - to give priority to God and matters pertaining to God. 

In short, it is being in touch with the Spirit of the Lord, who lives with us and within us and makes us realize that we are the sons and daughters of the Lord almighty. The Spirit instructs us that to know and enjoy our privileges as children of God, to understand the value of being God's sons and daughters: in straight terms, to have the mind of Christ!

Good teachings and Right teachings

WORD 2day: Monday, 22nd week in Ordinary time

August 31, 2020: 1 Corinthians  2: 1-5; Luke 4: 16-30

The world today runs after so many preachers, sages, gurus, leaders, speakers, trainers, etc. There are many who practice it as a trade! Some have fans and followers across the globe. And today in a scenario of lockdown, where people are locked down to their homes and digital screens, when people cannot get out into the public squares of businesses and professions, these speakers and gurus have chosen to reach out to the homes, through FB lives, webinars, Youtube lives, Google Meets and so many other platforms. Of course, they are all good... talented... interesting... exciting... thought provoking. But the question is, how right are the teachings? The Word today counsels us: it is important to differentiate good teachings from right teachings.

Teachings that are worded beautifully, formulated creatively and expressed attractively but do not lead to true harmony, self transcendence, compassionate love and mutual concern based on the fact that there is some One who unites us all, invites all to form one beautiful community of brothers and sisters... how "right" can those teaching be... though they may sound good and attractive?

The readings today give us a clarity: so-called good teachings are based on human prowess of mind while the right teachings are founded on the power of the Wisdom from God. The Gospel presents us the sad fact that the world prefers the former to the latter. That is why today we need to question what according to us is "good"... If what is good is what is acceptable in the eyes of the Lord, only the right teachings can be good too!

A GOD WHO RELATES

Encountering, enchanting, empowering...

August 30, 2020: 22nd Sunday in Ordinary time
Jeremiah 20: 7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16: 21-27

Where is God amidst all the confusion we are in? Disease, death, depression and desolation - where is God in all these?

Who is God? Can we not have everything turned to normal in a minute, by God? Is not God capable of it?

Why should there be a God, when things are so out of control? There is disease on one side, violence on another, conspiracies on yet another, selfish schemings and inhuman manipulations all over. Why should I believe in a God, then?

These are some of the questions raised these days universally. The Word today, does not answer them...but they point to us how faulty these questions are! How these are to be made sense of...all within a relationship, because our God is not a power that protects, nor a principle which governs. Yes, our trust and our belief is not in a power or in a principle which is called God, but in a Person... in three persons...who reveal themselves to us. In acknowledging that revelation and accepting it, we grow in a relationship called faith. The Word today presents to us, a God relates to us.

An Encountering God

We have an encountering God, a God who meets us on our everyday journey, intercepts our daily routine, and comes up with questions and proposals that demand our utmost attention. Not just questions that take an answer, but questions that lead to life choices, radical commitments and fundamental stands.

God created everything and found it good; God created human persons and found them very good! God gave them the gift of freedom, capacity to love, strength to forgive and the virtue of being good...in short, God created them in God's own image! But soon the human persons started using these, rather misusing these, towards selfishness, vengeance, hatred and thus gave into slavery! Consequences followed: unhappiness, wretchedness, wickedness and all such curses. Human persons found ways and means of making their own life and existence more and more miserable... God encountered the human persons; they refused to listen to God. God still continues to encounter humanity; humanity refuses to heed. They have set a norm for themselves and would love to conform to it, ruining themselves and everyone around! Is it not time to conform to the call of the Lord and seek "what is good, what God wants and what is the perfect thing to do!" (Rom 12:2).

An Enchanting God

If only we pay heed to the Lord who seeks us, in that encounter and in the ways that God reveals Godself to us, God is ever enchanting. Sometimes when God encounters we are so mesmerised, enticed and gripped by the experience that, we make decisions, we make choices which otherwise we would not have made at all. God overpowers us, complains Jeremiah today. Yes, God overpowers us with love, with God's love.

Amidst all the crisis that we are living in today, if only we truly allow the Lord to encounter us, God would enchant us. God would give us the light to see things from a different perspective - a perspective of beholding the gift that we are to each other, a perspective of looking at the entire humanity as our common identity, a perspective to treat this universe as our common home, a perspective to understand life in all its completeness without absolutising its material dimension...in short it would leave us mesmerised, in a state of enlightenment that makes sense of everything in terms of relationship, true, authentic and genuine relationships. 

An Empowering God

It is when we come out of that mesmerised state, we realise what we have done...that we have fallen for God, fallen in love with that wonderful person and given our word for so many things that are so difficult in our world today: a world with such warped, strange, queer and sometimes nauseating principles, policies and priorities. A prolonged commitment seems an impossibility, a tough enroute to happiness seems an impracticality, selfless love and sensitive hearts seem an unavailable commodity. 

But God empowers... God empowers us with encouragements and at the same time corrections, as we see in Jesus' conversation with Peter. We shall meet with tough situations and we would have to respond to trying demands, but the Lord would be with us to guide us through. We would face situations that we cannot understand or explain, but we would feel the strength to live through them, until we reach that state in life where we would be able to look back and observe the whole picture, and see the Lord standing by all the time and walking along all the way. It may look like the Lord is chiding - as Jesus calls Peter Satan today; but it is just the relationship that we have with God - who cares for us and empowers us in every way.

It is only through God's empowering love that we can know, choose and hold on to what is Good, what is acceptable and what is perfect... only through that love, the love of a God who relates!

The Christ Logic

THE WORD AND THE FEAST

August 29, 2020: Remembering the Beheading of John, the Baptist
Jeremiah 1: 17-19; Mark 6: 17-29

St.Paul boasts often saying, there is a different kind of a logic that is at work in us... and the first person who lived by that logic even before Christ the Lord, was John! In fact Christ called him the greatest of those born of a woman. The sufferings of this world are nothing compared to the glory that awaits us in the Lord, St. Paul would remind us.

This special, if not strange, logic can be called Christ Logic... a logic that gets its stamp of divine approval from the words, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is all about being the last and finding yourself the first; serving everyone and finding yourself the master of the moment; going about in silent righteousness and finding the entire world after you - after you either following you or trying to do away with you!

Be a servant to be the Leader, be the least to be considered the best, be ready for the Cross in order to taste the true love of God... identifying ourselves with Christ is a serious affair. We would either be judged "strange"or "challenging". Many went through this ordeal due to this Christ logic... Jesus himself was affected by that, wasn't he?...they called him 'possessed'...they called him 'out of his mind'...and finally villainised him and killed him, just as they did with John the Baptist.

The Baptist was an extreme illustration of Christ Logic, just like Jeremiah was in his time. And both of them were eliminated as early as possible by the world around them. The same happened to Jesus and in this, Jeremiah and John the Baptist had proved themselves to be prefigurements to Christ, the prototypes of those who live by Christ logic. 

Applying today that Christ logic... what do we expect of the world? Persecutions and pressures...what would be our response to them? The prosperous evil ones against whom we need to be shouting from the dark, apparently in vain... what would we make of it? In today's culture of hatred and violence, what would our style be? Do we dare to make our own, the Christ logic?

Wisdom and Foolishness - The Christian Paradigm

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

August 28, 2020: Remembering St. Augustine
1 Corinthians 1: 17-25; Matthew 25: 1-13

"Stay awake", warned the Gospel yesterday and that seems to be a constant reminder these days... with the rising political friction, ecological crisis and social turbulence. Staying awake and not missing the point that the Lord wishes to communicate, is also spoken of so much by the Saint we remember today: St Augustine - "I fear the Lord passing by!" 

Augustine's anxiety not to miss the Lord comes from the absolute dependence on the Lord, that was so typical of Augustine, just as we see also in St. Paul. They both believed and taught that we are made for the sake of the Lord and that we would find our true fulfillment in the Lord alone. This was the wisdom that they stood for, spoke of, and wanted to instill in every believer in Christ. 

One of the ways of missing what the Lord wants to impress upon us, or one way in which we could totally miss the Lord is confounding ourselves between what is true wisdom and the foolishness that presents itself as prudence and wisdom, in the world today. The world has its own definition of wisdom and foolishness, success and failure... everything, to put it simply, calculated in terms of benefits and gains in comparison to the effort and investment. Convenience and comfort seem unfailing criteria of choice. But can these be Christian parameters?

The Christian paradigm, as Paul says is the Cross and the hope that it projects. However hard we may try, no other paradigm can make sense of this.  The sacrifices we make and the selfless goodwill we have towards others are true Christian parameters of righteousness. Being good and doing good without expecting anything in return or without looking for its credits,  is the cross we are called to embrace if we wish to belong to the Bridegroom!

Waiting... but how?!?

THE WORD AND THE SAINT

August 27, 2020: Remembering St. Monica, the Mother who waited!

1 Corinthians 1:1-9; Matthew 24: 42-51

The Word today brings out the all important spiritual practice of Waiting. Waiting is a daily-life experience for most of us, if not all of us. When we look at it from a larger perspective of Spirituality and life changing experiences, it can be of three modes depending on the disposition with which a person waits.

Utopian Waiting, is a kind of excited waiting. It is more or less like a child who is waiting with excitement for a Christmas gift from the Santa. There is so much of dreaming and planning about the gift. The gift is opened and admired and experienced, all in imagination or at the mental plane, even before it reaches the hands of the beholder. Here there is so much of noise made about it though no one is absolutely sure what it is all about. About waiting for the Lord too, there are people who do this, aren't they?

Slumberous Waiting, is a kind of inactive waiting, just waiting to kill the time till it all happens. There is nothing much done about it, or practically nothing, because the person waiting does not expect anything spectacular at the end of it all. There is a kind of indifference and cynicism, even a bit of pessimism! There is nothing new under the sun and what is going to be has always been, they believe. They feel they have nothing much to accomplish and there is so much of compromise and lethargy here, that when it really happens they are hardly prepared!

Spiritual Waiting, is a  kind of wholesome waiting, which lives the present moment with a holistic mindset that contains within this particular moment the gratitude for the past and the hope for the future! It is a kind of spiritual disposition that is sincere and genuine about the present life, with all its responsibilities and trials, joys and difficulties, without belittling what has gone before and what awaits. It is fundamentally living one's life to the full, serenely waiting for the plan of eternity to unfold in all its grandeur. 

St. Monica whom we remember today, was a mother who waited, waited with such spiritual fervour for her son to come back to the Lord. And when it happened, it was so glorious, that we shall be celebrating once again tomorrow! May be Monica offers us an inspiration, at this time of crisis characterised by an uncertain waiting, to make it a spiritual exercise, living every day to the full, in union with the Lord who stands by us unceasingly. 

The Lord be with you!

WORD 2day: Wednesday, 21st week in Ordinary time

August 26, 2020: 2 Thessalonians 3: 6-10, 16-18; Matthew 23: 27-32

The loftiest wish one can make for another is, that the Lord be with him or her! But a Christian hears it almost all the time that he or she is out there to pray, specially in union  with the other brothers and sisters. Is that no our day to day experience? Today St. Paul makes the same wish and prays that we may be blessed with peace. 

True peace and serenity will come only with the presence of the Lord and that is the meaning of the wish, 'Lord be with you!' The Hebrew and the Arabic tradition captures it excellently well with their wish - Shalom (in Hebrew) and Salaam (in the Arabic versions). This is a wish for happiness, peace, serenity and fulfillment all in one, coming from the presence of the Lord experienced and lived on a daily basis and at every moment of one's life.

But this wish is at one and the same time, a blessing and a challenge. A blessing because it is in that moment of blessing that the Lord decides to intervene definitively in favour of the salvation of the entire humankind. With the Lord by my side I can face any stormy sea. With the Lord on my side, I can stand firm against anything that works against peace or well being of humanity. 

The wish is a challenge because, the Lord being with us all the time, is a bit inconvenient. We would prefer rather to be by ourselves at times, in secret and privacy. We would rather not think of the all-knowing and ever present God at some moments of our daily lives. The Lord would be aware of everything we say or do, because the Lord is close at hand. Would I feel comfortable if the Lord knows all that I am involved in? Or would there be areas, where I would rather be by myself, without God? That is a challenge! If only we examine all those things that break peace and spoil serenity - we would see they belong to this category, where we wish to be away from the Lord. And Jesus challenges us saying we try to get rid of all that reminds of God...signs, reminders, experiences and even, persons some times.

It is good to reflect today, how much do we mean it when we wish each other, the Lord be with you...and also with you! 

Keep Calm and Live on!

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 21st week in Ordinary time

August 25, 2020: 2 Thessalonians 2: 1-3,14-17; Matthew 23: 23-26

It looks like the crazy ones were there right from the beginning! At times we want our spiritual life to be exciting, to be on the move, to be ticking away in fret, like a suspense thriller. There is an imminent sign and there is a mighty revolution in the making...such claims are galore these days on the street corner banners and well funded TV channels - and they tend to quote the scripture passage, 'behold I make something new!' St. Paul warns us today against such tendencies. He says, don't crave for sensation; KEEP CALM and go about your daily duties!

Jesus sounds more vehement with the same message in today's Gospel: don't be hypocrites - he says - don't make a show of your piety, don't make a living out of the fears of people and don't try your imaginations in God's name. Just because you have a pulpit, or an audience, or a media, or today the social network platform, that does not mean, you say whatever you want and get away with it; it does not warrant that you exploit the weakness of the people, create sensation and see how you could cash in on it. Just keep calm and live on. 

Things may seem dark and dreadful, uncertain and unpromising, but don't give into panic. Live your daily life to the full in whatever way you can, love each other sincerely amidst all the lockdown routine, reach out to one another with genuine care and relate with truth in your heart. Allow God to take control of the entire reality and don't claim franchise for decisions and activities that belong to God alone! Allow things to take their course, but you remain connected to the Lord of all things! That is...

Keep Calm and Live on... shall we?

Will you be found under the fig tree?

THE WORD AND THE SAINT 

August 24, 2020: Celebrating St. Bartholomew the Apostle

Revelations 21: 9-14; John 1:45-51

We celebrate today, St. Bartholomew, one of the 12 foundation stones, one of the 12 apostles rooted firm in Christ. Jesus gives him two compliments - one, that he was a person who had no guile in him and second, that Jesus saw him under the fig tree! The name that is given in the Gospel, Nathanael is equalised with the person of the apostle Bartholomew. Apart from that name, we have a context provided to us: sitting under the fig tree!

Sitting under the fig tree, had a very special significance in that context and Bartholomew is interested and curious how Jesus got to know about him and his tryst with truth.  Sitting under the fig tree would mean (as we see in Micah 4:4), meditating on the Word of God, reflecting on the things that God expects from oneself, and comprehending on the way one relates to his or her world. In the Indian tradition we have the images of enlightenment under a Bodhi tree and varied other parallels. 

The surprise for Bartholomew was more about the fact that Jesus has noted his sitting under the fig tree! That is, Jesus knew the search that was in Bartholomew's mind, the yearning he had for truth, the eagerness he had to meet the Christ of God. That was surprising for Bartholomew. Jesus is ready to surprise us, but the question is: are we ready to be surprised? 

Will Jesus find us under the fig tree? How much importance do I attach on a daily basis, to remain in sacred silence... or to reading the Word of God... or to meditating on the Word... or simply to remain in that disposition to connect to the Lord... that is why the question: when Jesus wishes to, will you be found under the fig tree?