Not Fair 2

Several years ago I had an operation and spent a couple of weeks recuperating at a place for elderly and sick Maryknoll priests and brothers, near our seminary in New York. One of the things that impressed me very much about these old missioners was how they automatically helped each other despite their own infirmities. For example, at dinner time some who themselves had trouble walking would be seen pushing the wheelchairs of others who needed assistance.

They were men who had led tremendous lives as missioners in china where they experience war persecution and jail; others had begun new missions in rugged areas of Africa and Latin America. They had fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited the sick so often over so many years that it had become an automatic response in many of them. They would be like those on the right hand of the Lord at the judgment who would ask him:

"'When did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, lacking clothes and clothe you? When did we find you sick or in prison and go to see you?' And the King will answer, 'In truth I tell you, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.' " —Mt 25:37-40

The spontaneous response of these old missioners was done without a great deal of theological reflection on our incarnate Lord coming to us through others. Rather, from habitually answering the call for charity, their love of God spontaneously and automatically showed itself in their love and kindness for others and how they treated them.

I heard a story about a very good priest I had me years ago who died recently here in the Philippines. It's a good illustration of how we gradually car build up that automatic response to Christ's invitations for our help and love.

It seems that one night this priest received a telephone call about 11 p.m. It was a very poor woman he knew from a slum area who was asking if he might drive her son to the hospital as the boy was seriously ill. The priest immediately started to think of all the reasons why he couldn't go: "I'm old and pretty sick myself!" "Couldn't they wait until the morning? It's late!" "Isn't there anyone else available?"

But, realizing that it was probably very serious, he agreed and got dressed and drove the boy. As they were riding along, the little boy asked him, "Are you God?"

Taken aback, he answered, "No — but why do you ask?"

"Well," the boy replied, "I felt very sick and afraid back there and when I asked my mother how we could get to the hospital, she said that God would provide — and here you are!"

It was a good reminder, the priest admitted, and had come through the mouth of a child: we're not God, but he does use us as channels of his grace and, in a sense, he "needs" us. The priest resolved that whenever any sort of reasonable request for help came to him, he would try to follow through on it right away, for that is how God comes to us through other people in need. Often there is no time for any discernment but the most basic: that help is needed and I'm available.

Like this priest, to the extent that your re­sponse becomes consistent and relatively auto­matic you can probably expect several things to happen in your life.

First, that you'll get more calls for help in the middle of the night! Second, that you'll gradually) be able to handle such inconveniences with in creasing equanimity and perhaps in time ever recognize the Lord coming to you through the person in need. And finally, that you'll become true disciple of our Lord, having an abiding sense o his peace and joy and love, even in. those `difficult times' -- like when the phone rings at midnight with a call for help.

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Not Fair

Many years ago during Prohibition times in the United States there was a gangster named Dutch Schulz who was mortally wounded in a gunfight in Chicago. As he lay dying in the street, a priest ran out and gave Dutch absolution. Not fair!' some claimed. 'Here was a man who stole everything all his life and at the last minute seemed to have stolen heaven!'

In contrast, Dutch's critics might have com­pared him to the theoretical monk who had lived innocently all his life in a monastery and at the last minute committed one mortal sin and would be condemned to hell. Not fair!' they might cry —and they'd be right...

But thank God, that's not how it works. Jesus has told us not to judge others (Lk 6:37). We never really know what goes on in people like Dutch over the years — perhaps a real desire to break away from his life's patterns and the failure to do so, deep psychological scars, whatever. We simply don't know what goes on in the depths of other people (1Cor 2:11). Oftentimes we're not even sure of what's really going on in ourselves!

And so the Lord says to leave judgment to him On 9:39). He knows of our longing for good, and how rare may be our complete turning away from him (mortal sin). He knows of the good in us when even we may not recognize it. The 'good thief on the cross castigated the other one who had de­nounced Jesus:

"'Have you no fear of God at all? You got the same sentence as he did, but in our case we deserved it: we are paying for what we did. But this man has done nothing wrong.' Then he said, 'Jesus, re­member me when you come into your kingdom.' Jesus answered him, 'In truth I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.' " — Lk 23:40-43

Where did this sentiment and hope come from in the good thief, and how many of his contempo­raries would have judged him the way Jesus did?

Prescinding from these rather rare cases how-ever, there's an old adage that life is a continuum and we die pretty much as we have lived. The whole of one's life is a time for growing—or for no growing. Hopefully, over the course of life a person will more and more come to know and love God and other people, as well as himself or herself.

I recall the obituary of a Maryknoll priest who died a few years ago. He was a scripture scholar as well as a missionary and throughout his life his knowledge and love of the lord had continually deepened. It was mentioned in the obituary that in the last few years of his life he would spend long periods in the chapel apparently engrossed in God’s presence. His death was simply the culmination and ratification of his long life in which he came to be totally immersed in the lord with whom he had been growing more and more in love over the years. Death was his passage to the fullness of that love.


To be continued....

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SPIRITUAL LEPROSY

SPIRITUAL LEPROSY

I am for sure, many of us will not even the see the picture below.  The moment we see this picture, a type of aversion engulfs us, a feeling of uneasiness crushes our mind.  Yes, this is a sample for leprosy.  Though there are medicines in these modern times to treat the leprosy, in the Old Testament it considered as the curse from God, and that person will be kept outside of the City until he is cured and certified by the high priest that he is ok.  In Old Testament there is a famous passage which narrates the leprosy of Naaman in 2Kings 5:1-15.  We feel dislike towards leprosy or lepers because we are fine and healthy.  May be physically we are alright, but spiritually we are lepers.  We are affected with Spiritual Leprosy.

The person who is affected by leprosy will have imperfect limbs, with no finger, nose, toe and etc.  Many of us think that this is because of the effect of the disease.  But the research shows that they loose not because of the disease.  It is because of the numbness.  Lepers will not have any feelings in the affected area, even if you cut the fingers they won't feel anything.  So, when they sleep the rats come and eat away their limbs, because of the numbness (feelinglessness) they do not know this.

In the same way we are affected in our life.  Without Prayer, Bible Reading, Sacraments, without going to the Church a kind of spiritual numbness creeps into our hearts.  There is no feeling of sin in our conscience.  Just take for granted, in the name of culture, fashion, modernity, we just loose the feeling of dignity and modesty.  Anything that gives comfort is alright.  Nothing is sin.  As a result without our knowledge we loose the grace of God, gift of God, Spirit of God, providence of God, protection of God exposing ourselves to all types of dangers of soul.

In the case of Naman the leper, his spiritual leprosy has to be cleansed fist than his physical leprosy.  He was affected by the leprosy of 'pride'. He was strong with leprosy and we too are the same.  The prophet sends the word to obey.  But he didn't.  The Bible says 'He thought' (2Kings 5:11). We also think many things instead of obeying to the Word of God.  When he obeyed he found the grace of God, praises the mercy of God, believes in the presence of God (2Kings 5:15) and at the end he could meet the Man of God, the prophet Elisha.  And he became perfect, like a child, entered into the Kingdom of God.  Do you know what he took with him when he went back to his country??? He came with silver, gold and all types of ornaments but went with two sack loads of soil from the land of God (2Kings 5:17).  The soil from God's land is more worth than any silver and gold.  To be a stupid for the sake of God is better than to be wise in the Godless position.

Let us come to our senses as the prodigal son (Luke 15:17), let us get rid of our spiritual numbness, senselessness, and turn back to God with raising up our imperfect limbs, becoming conscious of our imperfection, even from a distance like that of the ten lepers (Luke 17:12) let us shout: JESUS, MASTER! TAKE PITY ON US! He will help us to come to our senses and we shall be alive and active with the grace and mercy of God.

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A Story....

က်ြန္ေတာ္ၾကားခဲ့တဲ့ဇာတ္လမ္း ေလးတစ္ပုဒ္

လူ႕ဘဝတဲ့ ဆန္းၾကယ္မွူေတြၾကားထဲမွာ ရွင္သန္ရင္း ေနာက္ဆုံးတစ္ေန့မွာ ဒီ ရုပ္ဝတၲဳ ကမာၻေလာကၾကီးက ေနတစ္ဖန္ ခြဲခြာရအုန္း မွာမဟုတ္လား အေတြ႕အၾကဳံေတြ သင္ခန္းစာေတြ ကို သင္ယူေလ့လာရင္းနဲ့ မေရမရာ မေသမခ်ာ အေနမၾကာပဲ ငိုသံေတြနဲ့ အတူ ဒီပုတ္သိုးလြယ္တဲ့ ခနၲာၾကီးကို စြန္႕ခြာရ ေတာ့မယ္
အရင္တစ္ေလာက လူတစ္ေယာက္ မေမွ်ာ္လင့္ေသးတဲ့အခ်ိန္ မွာေသျခင္းက သူ႕ကို ရစ္ပတ္ ေႏွာင္တုပ္သြား ေလတယ္ အသက္က ငယ္ငယ္ လ်င္ျမန္ ျဖတ္လတ္တုံး လူ႕ေလာက မွာရွိတဲ့ ေပ်ာ္စရာေတြ ကို ခံစားေနတုံးေပါ့
သူေသသြားေတာ့ သူေလာေလာလတ္လတ္ သုံးခဲ့တဲ့ ပစၥည္းေလးေတြကို သူ႕အေခါင္းထဲ ထည့္ေပးလိုက္သတဲ့ဗ်ာ ျဖစ္လာတာက စ်ာပနအျပီး သုံးရက္ ေလာက္ၾကာေတာ့ သူ႕အေမရဲ့ Cell Phone ဆီကို Text Message တစ္ခု ေရာက္လာသတဲ့ text message ထဲမွာ ေရးထားတာက HELP! တဲ့ ဘယ္နံပါတ္က ေနပို႕လိုက္တာလဲလို႕ စစ္ၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့ ဆုံးသြားတဲ့ သူ႕သားရဲ့ဲ့ နံပါတ္ျဖစ္ေနသတဲ့ ဒီဟာကို သိရေတာ့ ရွိသမွ်လူေတြ အားလုံး လဲလွုပ္လွုပ္ရွားရွား ျဖစ္သြားၾကတာေပါ့
ဒါနဲ့ ဟိုဌာနသတင္းပို႕ ဒီဌာနသတင္းပို႕ နဲ့ ေနာက္ဆုံးမေတာ့ မွူခင္းရဲေတြလာ ျပီး အေလာင္းျပန္ေဖာ္ၾက ေတာ့တာေပါ့ ေတြ႕ရေတာ့ အံ့ၾသစရာက အေလာင္းက ေတာ့ အဆင္းပ်က္ေနျပီ ဒါေပမဲ့ အေလာင္းေဘးက Cell Phone ေလးက battery အားကုန္ ခါနီးေလးနဲ့ အလုပ္လုပ္ ေနေသးတာကို ေတြ႕ရသတဲ့ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေသျပီးသားလူ ကဘယ္လိုလုပ္ text message ပို႕နိုင္မွာလဲ စဥ္းစားစရာပါပဲ ေနာက္ျပီး message အမ်ိဳးအစား အေၾကာင္းအရာကလဲ “ကယ္ပါ ကူညီ”ပါဆို တဲ့ဟာမ်ိဳး ကူညီခ်င္တယ္ ပဲထားပါအုန္း ေသျပီးလူကို ဘယ္လိုကူညီလို႕ရမလဲဗ်ာ
မိတ္ေဆြေကာ ကူညီခ်င္တယ္ဆိုရင္ ဘယ္လိုနည္းလမ္းနဲ့ ကူညီမွာလဲ
သူ႕မိဘေဆြမ်ိဳးေတြကလဲ ဘယ္လို ကူညီမယ္လို႕ ထင္ထားသလဲ
ဒီ တစ္ကယ့္အျဖစ္အမွန္ ဇာတ္လမ္းေလးက ဘာကို ရည္ညြန္းေနသလဲ က်ြန္ေတာ္တို႕ဘာေတြ ပိုသိဖို႕လိုေသးသလဲ ဘာေတြ မသိေသးတာ ေတြရွိေသးသလဲ
စဥ္းစား အေျဖရွာ ၾကည့္ၾကပါဗ်ာ ရႊင္လန္း ခ်မ္းေျမ့ၾကပါေစ

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You Know? second part

2nd …… is about the prayers which we use to communicate with God they called it conversation with God. There are three types of prayer
1. vocal prayer
2. meditative prayer
3. contemplative prayer
Vocal prayer: This is the prayer of the lips, with stress on words, recited or sung. The text is often prefabricated or ready-made and is often beautiful and inspiring. Vocal prayer may also be spontaneous.

Meditative prayer: or meditation, a prayer centered in the mind, which pictures and ponders, reflects and things of God and his wonderful dealings. The mind seeks understanding and insight. In meditation, the lips are quiet and the mind is active.

Contemplative prayer: or contemplation, a prayer of heart and will which reaches out to God’s presence. The lips and mind both come to rest, there is a simple gazing (looking) at the lord while the heart reaches in wordless prayer and the will seeks to be one with his.
Thank You and God bless you.

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Pope Urges Entire Church to Promote Vocations

Pope Urges Entire Church to Promote Vocations
Says This Marks Vitality of Local Community

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 10, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is underlining the necessity for every member of the Church to promote religious vocations.

This was one of the points emphasized by the Pope in a message for the 48th World Day of Prayer for Vocations, which will be celebrated May 15 on the theme of "Proposing Vocations in the Local Church." The message was released today.

The Pontiff noted that "particularly in these times, when the voice of the Lord seems to be drowned out by other voices and his invitation to follow him by the gift of one's own life may seem too difficult, every Christian community, every member of the Church, needs consciously to feel responsibility for promoting vocations."

"It is important to encourage and support those who show clear signs of a call to priestly life and religious consecration, and to enable them to feel the warmth of the whole community as they respond 'yes' to God and the Church," he said.

The Holy Father affirmed that "the Lord does not fail to call people at every stage of life to share in his mission and to serve the Church in the ordained ministry and in the consecrated life."

He asserted, "It is essential that every local Church become more sensitive and attentive to the pastoral care of vocations, helping children and young people in particular at every level of family, parish and associations -- as Jesus did with his disciples -- to grow into a genuine and affectionate friendship with the Lord, cultivated through personal and liturgical prayer."

Benedict XVI encouraged helping youth "to grow in familiarity with the Sacred Scriptures and thus to listen attentively and fruitfully to the Word of God; to understand that entering into God's will does not crush or destroy a person, but instead leads to the discovery of the deepest truth about ourselves; and finally to be generous and fraternal in relationships with others, since it is only in being open to the love of God that we discover true joy and the fulfillment of our aspirations."

Rich soil

The Pope appealed to priests "to testify to their communion with their bishop and their fellow priests, and thus to provide a rich soil for the seeds of a priestly vocation."

He encouraged families to be "animated by the spirit of faith and love and by the sense of duty, which is capable of helping children to welcome generously the call to priesthood and to religious life."

The Pontiff encouraged "catechists and leaders of Catholic groups and ecclesial movements, convinced of their educational mission," to "seek to guide the young people entrusted to them so that these will recognize and freely accept a divine vocation."

"Every moment in the life of the Church community -- catechesis, formation meetings, liturgical prayer, pilgrimages -- can be a precious opportunity for awakening in the People of God, and in particular in children and young people, a sense of belonging to the Church and of responsibility for answering the call to priesthood and to religious life by a free and informed decision," he affirmed.

The Holy Father noted, "The ability to foster vocations is a hallmark of the vitality of a local Church."

He concluded, "With trust and perseverance let us invoke the aid of the Virgin Mary, that by the example of her own acceptance of God's saving plan and her powerful intercession, every community will be more and more open to saying 'yes' to the Lord who is constantly calling new laborers to his harvest."

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