the need for community

A priest assigned to a city related once an experience he had while teaching what a community is among high school kids.  He picked out a girl from the class and asked her if something important should happen to her who would be deeply affected by her action?  The girl said, “You mean if I committed suicide or something?”  The priest said yes, and without thinking for long, she pointed to a friend, and said, “Mary here and my mother at home.”

That was all.  She could not think of any other person in that crowded room nor in the crowded neighborhood in which she lived.  Not even one in the class raised his or her hand voluntarily to state that they too would be affected by the decision.  Just two, “Mary and my mother.”

the holy week then

When we were children I remember quite well the way we celebrated holy week.  It was a week like no other week.  It was entirely different both in the atmosphere it created and in the manner we carried out our daily chores.  There were old people in the house then - people who, despite the steady encrouchment of modern culture, chose to uphold tradition at least for the duration of the holy week.  We call these practices then, mga panimad-on. 

The Holy Spirit – The Comforter

Two experiences

There are two activities in my priesthood that I find so rewarding.  Rewarding in the sense that it gives me a sense of fulfillment while actually doing so little.  Never anywhere else in the life and work of a priest is the law of proportionate returns so flagrantly repudiated. The result of such actions when done properly is so tremendous compared to the work expended.  If the priest is indeed “a pencil in God’s hand,” a mere instrument and channel of God’s grace, it is in these activities that one can see volumes done, a masterpiece created, a best seller hitting the charts . . . with just a little pencil lead. 

Permit me to tell you these activities in the concrete.

flores de mayo

Introduction

When I was a little boy I remember vividly the Ist of May.  With the other children of the barrio, we woke up enthusiastically early in the morning, scouted around and looked for flowers (the weather was not as dry then and plants were beginning to bloom).  It was then an interesting month for us children.  We considered it then as our month.  It was the month when the church took us, little children, seriously;  focusing its attention on us for the rest of the month and providing us with catechesis and teaching us to pray.  Personally, it was in one of these months of May of my childhood years, when I realized that the church is not just an adults’ world, talking only their language, doing things only adults could comprehend.  It was also our church.  The church that taught us the truths of the faith in a medium we can easily understand -- stories. The Church that taught us to pray to God in a language that was clearer and nearer to our hearts -- the offering of flowers. 

fasting

Instead of reflecting on the meaning of the ashes, I would like to rather focus my reflection on something so important in our Christian practice.  It has no more value for most of us today.  But this doesn’t mean that if this practice has lost its value we don’t need it anymore.  I personally believe that at this time we need it more than ever.  The practice I am referring to is fasting.  Fasting – in catholic practice which means we eat one full meal in a day.  Others out of devotion forgo food altogether, others take only bread and water throughout the day. 

dedication of the jaro cathedral

The year 1965 was an extraordinary year for all Filipinos, especially for us in the Visayas.  It was a year of jubilees.  Nineteen hundred and sixty five was the fourth centennial of the “formal evangelization” of the Philippines with the re-discovery of our islands by Miguel Legaspi, Fray Andres Urdaneta and Fray Martin de Rada (the first evangelist of Panay) on February 13, 1565.  It also recalled the beginning of our devotion to the Sto. Niño when the statue purportedly given by Magellan to the wife of Humabon, was found in a burned hut in Cebu on April 27, 1565 by the soldiers of Legaspi.

crisis 2

She has told her story last two years ago on one of our issues on Motherhood.  However we would like to tell it again and view it from another perspective - from the perspective of a mother who searched not so much the “whys” of the disability of a child, but for “what” she can do for him and the rest who have the same disability.