the joy and hope of one sent on mission

Beneath the surface, beyond what eyes can see, there is a silent, subtle growth taking place.

This is the hope that I took with me and the same experience that I have during the recollection-giving module in Bataan from 20 February-04 March 2005. It is an encounter with God who continues to say: “I hope on you.” And this hope is like a small seed that sprouts to life amidst human limitations on all fronts.

Hermosa National High School, Hermosa, Bataan. Home to thousands of students, mostly belonging to poor families. There were 7 sections of graduating class entrusted to our care for a day of recollection. Dodot, Joy, Jude and I handled a section of our own for a whole day of remembering, praying, playing, drawing, writing, eating and sharing. It was inspiring to see young people enter into prayer even for a short period of 15 minutes. The silence attained during those moments soothed my anxious spirit amidst the noise of students busy with their class.

On the second day, there were only three sections. I took the liberty to ask the group if I could just be their assistant. In a way, I was free from direct handling of a class. As I was scouring the building, I saw an opportunity for a direct, one-on-one conversation with students. This was also the time that Dodot found difficulty in handling the class, in getting it to participate actively in the activities we prepared. I asked Dodot if I could engage some of his students to individual colloquium. It proved to be fruitful one. On my part at least, it gave me consolation to know more deeply some students and to be there for them, just listening.

I met Franklin, a 19-year old student, with only one subject left before the school could recognized him as graduate. He belongs to the class handled by Joy. He said he asked permission from Joy if he could stay outside. He was standing near the balcony, leaning on the reels. He wore a cap, concealing blond-colored long hair. He fashioned big earring on the right, and a metal wrist band on his hand. His eyes dwells somewhere and I discovered that his sight was crying in despair. He wanted to be a soldier. His mother wants something else for him – to work in order to help the family. His older brother who is a soldier discouraged him from pursuing his childhood dream. He met a vehicular accident that made his dream far beyond his grasp. He resorted to drugs and other vices. Now he felt ashamed of his past. He loves his mother but fear confronting her. He felt at a loss. I offered my ears and my heart shared in his plight and together we hold on to the God of hope. Several others followed and the same experience of grace, of a felt-presence of God who never gives up on His children and meets them wherever they are.

Another experience was that of giving recollection to college students the next day. I took the challenge to be the main facilitator. I felt nervous and afraid that I will not be able to handle it well. I was losing confidence. My hands felt cold. And there I started. During the opening rites, I joined in the prayer with the students. I beg God to take me, all that I was going through that moment. Before God, I recognized my limitations and weaknesses and put my hope in His presence and grace. This we did as the Prayer for Peace was being played. What followed was an amazing way of grace at work. I was amazed how I was transformed into a fearful facilitator to a confident one, brimming with passion and creativity. In the end, I was consoled by the experience of God at work in my weakness and using me as His instrument of reconciliation, of peace, of an encounter with Him.

There was a day that I felt so tired and I didn’t know why. It was perhaps the day that I became intoxicated with ‘success’ yet also felt insecure of the giftedness of others. It was the day that I failed to be sensitive enough and simply presumed that everything was understood as agreed upon. Our group suffered miscommunication and misunderstanding. This I came to know as darkness descended the plain. We were confused. We discovered that we didn’t have clear grasp of our roles and responsibilities in the team. And we felt the toll of a disunited ministry. I simply felt heavy and irritable. Yet our group didn’t end there. Personally, I was very much consoled by the experience of bridging gaps created by misunderstanding. Our honest and respectful conversation paved the way to better handling of team ministry for recollection-giving. More than that, it became an experience of relationships fortified, as it was, rising together from the rubles of disunity. The team ministry became an avenue of learning from one another, welcoming and affirming the giftedness of the other and at the same time a ground to readily offer oneself in service. I was edified by Joy’s quality of presence to students, of Dodot’s silent yet solid and supportive presence in the group, and of Jude’s assuring and confident presence before a task at hand.

This is how I describe my experience of the ministry of the Word. It was an experience of sharing in the mission of Christ. It was an experience of hope which brings me the conviction that at the end of the day, all shall be well. It is a hope that tears down the barriers imposed by weakness and sinfulness. It is an experience of hope, of the assurance that somehow the seeds of grace has been planted and someday soon, will see its springtime. It is a hope that makes me not only to look forward but also to remain rooted in the present – that here and now, God is at work, even in the midst of chaos. When Christ the King calls and takes the steed, He stays along with His friends in labor leading them to share in the joy of His harvest.


[II]

Recollection-giving has become a laboratory of learning. It taught me in many ways the craft of tapping into the wellspring of hope within a person. I brought with me the experiences I had of retreats and recollections I attended. I derived much of the design, techniques, process from the modules given in the SPFY program. Our group employed the art of drawing out the Christic-self learned especially in the different psycho-spiritual modules. We focused on the importance of prayer as a way to facilitate that personal encounter between God and His child. We shared therefore what we have learned and experienced of prayer. This we did after the ground has been cultivated and prepared for that encounter, meaning, that the participant has been helped in getting in touch with his/her personal history, with his/her fears and hopes, with his/her deepest desire and all these, he/she brings to the Lord.

The participants usually are receptive and cooperative. Yet there are times that I and the participants are not on the same wavelength. I may be using a language that is different from theirs. There were times that I tended to be idealistic, that this module would easily fit the needs of the participants. It was not the case however. Sometimes, different groups need a different approach. This calls for an approach that starts where the clienteles are. This means also that a module has to be flexible in application yet clear of its goal. Activities serve as a pathway towards the goal – of knowing and accepting oneself more deeply, of healing and strengthening relationships and over and above this, of putting God in the picture.

I was also confronted by my own weaknesses and limitations and even of sinfulness. Yet they are the same entry point of grace. Grace taps into the very gifts God has given me which I have forgotten perhaps because of fear and pride. This same reality made me see that I am not different from those people attending the recollection. Instead of putting on a crusading mind, I am invited to take on the humble, servant mind of Christ. At the end of the day, Christ must increase and I must decrease. To say that recollection giving is solely a work of grace is to remind myself that it is God’s work and not mine. I only share in His work where both my own creativity and receptivity to what others can offer are activated. The Principle and Foundation has it – that I do these things because I want to give greater glory to God and so to employ gifts and resources towards this end.

[III]

From this experience of recollection-giving, I felt the hunger of the people. As I hunger for God, they too hunger all the more. Within them is a flickering fire that moves them to find their way to what they truly want and desire. They desire healing and reconciliation, they want to make sense of their pains, they long for peace and wholeness, they have an arsenal of hopes and joys waiting to be tapped and within them is Christ longing to shine more fully in their life. Here, I am not different from them. I share in their joys and hopes. I stand in the same ground of grief and anxieties. They only appear in different shapes and colors in each individual.

This reminds me that a pastor has to smell like his sheep. “Ang tunay na pastol ay amoy-tupa.” I believe that a sense of solidarity has to be the springboard of any pastoral applications of any programs of formation. Only with this premise that a pastoral program can acquire a human face. Solidarity gives birth to hope leading a person to becoming more loving and more faithful.

Entering into solidarity with the hungers and thirst of the people today will give rise to concrete response to concrete needs. It is a response anchored on cura personalis and nurtured through friendship. I believe these are the values and methods that I must carry with me as a minister of the Word, as a pastor wanting to be formed after the heart of Jesus: solidarity, care and friendship. This does not come easily to me. It requires me to go beyond the narrow confines of my own world. It calls for a choice to love which comes as a process of sifting through different motivations at play within me. It challenges me to conquer my fear with faith in a God who holds everything in His loving hands.

[IV]

What it is to be a pastor has taken flesh in my experience of meeting and living with and witnessing Josefino priests in action. Their person and ministry brought so much consolation to me. Their sense of magis, their hospitality, their passion, their creativity, their generosity, their holiness made an impact on me. I was very much edified by their presence.

Msgrs. Willy Fabros and Vic Ocampo, though, not that young anymore, still find creative ways to better minister to their people. Msgr. Vic engages in what he calls “visitation to funeral wake” where he would be available for confession, mass and catechesis. Aside from being the parish priest, he also make an extra effort for biblical apostolate. Msgr. Willy works as the director of parochial schools in the diocese. One time, he woke up at 3:00 am just to travel to Nueva Ecija and there learned the BEC system at work in one school. There is that passion for learning, for innovative formation within the school-context. Fr Mike Tria, is a young priest who just got back from his indefinite leave from priestly ministry. His is an inspiring story of struggle, of finding himself once again or better yet, of him being found again by God through the fatherly ministry of Bishop Soc. Now he is appointed as the youth formation director of the diocese. We met these Josefino priests in Orani, Bataan.

In Mariveles, we met two edifying Josefino priests – Fathers Perry Medina and Jun Villanueva. Fr. Jun is a native of the Archdiocese of Nueva Caceres in Naga. He experienced rejection form his own diocese. Now he is in Bataan and servesd as an economus. His ministry flourished even in a land not his own. Fr Perry is a priest of indomitable energy. We witnessed him run the parish programs. What made a mark on me most is that he is a priest whose heart is wide enough to make room for all kinds of people. He visits and says mass to Aeta communities in the mountains. He looks after the sick in the mental hospital. He creatively pursue his ministry to the GRO’s in the community and made them feel that they are part of the Church. We met two of his GRO friends, Weng and Zaira, during the evening of the town fiesta. In him I felt the strong sense of “Ignatian indifference” – that readiness to be assigned anywhere.

Through their person and friendship we have been blest to know their friends too. Indeed their ministry thrives because of their sense of personal care, of friendship and of solidarity with the people of God they so faithfully, creatively serve.

heroic lesson of love

Each year, a special atmosphere seems to envelop us. And it cannot be otherwise, because in the space of just a few days we recall and re-live many of the mysteries of our faith. In fact during these days, that which we call to mind is all love.

HOLY THURSDAY

The priesthood is love; it possesses a ministerial character - which means service – and is therefore concrete love.
The Eucharist is love; here, Jesus gives all of Himself to us.
Unity, which Jesus asked of the Father with the priestly prayer, “That all may be one as you and I are one,” is love, an effect of love.

Love is the commandment which Jesus kept in his heart through his whole life, only to reveal it the day before his death: “Love one another as I love you. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” We cannot let this day pass without remembering to tell Jesus of our desire to adhere completely to “his” and the “new” commandment; a commandment which did not remain unexplained, because he added: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

GOOD FRIDAY

It is with his death on the cross on Good Friday that Jesus teaches the most sublime, divine, heroic lesson of what love is.

He had given up everything: a life lived beside Mary amidst discomfort and in obedience; three years of preaching in which he revealed the Truth, gave witness to the Father, promised the Holy Spirit, and did all sorts of miracles of love; three hours on the cross from which he pardoned his executioners, opened Paradise to the Good Thief, gave his mother to us and, lastly, his Body and Blood which he had already given to us mystically in the Eucharist.

All that remained to him was his divinity. He ceased feeling his union with the Father, which had made him so powerful on earth as the Son of God and so regal on the cross; he had to be disunited, in a way, from the one who, he said, was one with him: “The Father and I are one.” (Jn 10,30).

In him love was annihilated, light was darkened, wisdom was silenced.
We were detached from the Father. It was necessary that the Son, in whom we all were present, experience detachment from the Father. He had to experience being abandoned by God, so that we may never be abandoned again.

Jesus was able to overcome such an immense trial by re-abandoning himself to the Father: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Lk 23, 46). In this way, he recomposed the broken unity between God and humanity and men and women among themselves. He was now manifesting himself to be the remedy to every disunity, the key to unity.

Now it is our turn to cooperate with this grace and do our part.
Since Jesus assumed all that is negative, behind each suffering, each separation, we can discover Jesus himself, one of the “faces” of his abandonment. We can embrace him in those sufferings and divisions, say “yes” to him just as he did when he completely accepted the Father’s will. Then he will live in us – even though we may be in pain – as the Risen Jesus; the peace we regain will be the proof.

EASTER OF THE RESURRECTION

Jesus is faithful to his promise: “... where two or three are gathered together in my name [that is, in my love], there am I in the midst of them.” Yes, where two or more are united in his name, the Risen Jesus is present, and he brings with him the gifts of the Spirit: light, joy, peace, love. This was the awesome experience made with my first companions during the Movement’s beginnings in Trent, during World War II, when we made the commandment, “Love one another as I love you,” our own, and formulated a pact among ourselves: “I am ready to die for you, I for you...”

The Risen Jesus is just what the world is waiting for!
It is waiting for witnesses who can truly say: we have seen him with the senses of our soul, we have discovered him in the light with which he enlightened us, we have touched him in the peace he gave us, we have heard his voice in the depths of our hearts, we have tasted his unmistakable joy.

In this way we can assure everyone that he is the fullness of happiness and we can make the world hope again.

(Meditation by Chiara Lubich, Foundress of Focolare Movement)