A time for reflection
We’re staying home all this Christmas season. We were late in reserving accommodations in Baguio, a beloved holiday retreat; we should have done it a year ago. Boracay was an option, but the Barrientoses, Rene and Celia, will be out of the country, visiting long-missed grandchildren.
Vergel and I are no lovers of the beach—we prefer a mountain view, and he particularly likes inland waters—but, where possible, Vergel and Rene, old buddies from the twin suburban towns of Malabon and Navotas, would be where each other could be at this time of their lives. Besides, Lanie, our lone kasambahay, is not taking her vacation this time of year, a good excuse for us to be away ourselves some time—she’s postponing until April.
Anyway, as we get older, it seems harder and harder to plan anything, vacations particularly, which require committing to dates, flying or taking long road trips and arranging hotel accommodations way ahead of time so we can avail ourselves of discounts. Alas, our physical conditions can suddenly change anytime. Fortunately, there are local places nearby that will do, like Tagaytay, of which I have fond childhood memories.
Personal Advent
But must we really go anywhere at all? Staying home for the holidays might just be a welcome change. Such arrangements surely happen for a reason, too. So I aim to put my home time to good use. As it happens, I’m between cataract operations. I had my first last month and will have the second after the holidays. The procedure should greatly ease my vision issues. As it is, I already can see fairly well without glasses, but I’ll see far better yet with them, although, again, I won’t be fitted with them until I’ve had both eyes done.
Anyway, through years of practice, I’ve gotten better and better at something infinitely more important—turning my vision inward, and on this particular occasion going through my personal Advent. Oftentimes in the past, if not always, it was only in retrospect that I recognized God’s redeeming presence. But, like I said, I feel I’ve come a long way. I swear that sometimes I see His presence in certain arrangements as they occur, knowing only He could have have made them happen.
It’s not easy to spot Him if we insist on humanizing Him, limiting our understanding of Him in our habitual, shortsighted human ways. We tend to put Him in a box of our own making, as Fr. Tito Caluag said in one of his recent homilies. Father Tito had to remind us that, even when Jesus walked the earth in human form, He was not recognized, let alone accepted, in spite of the detailed prophesies preceding His coming. Alas, He did not fit human expectations.
Father Tito thus advised us not to put God in a box, not to fit Him into our human concepts and biases, where when He does not do what we expect Him to do, we selfishly conclude He’s not there for us. Indeed, it seems simply too hard for us to take a no for an answer from God to our prayers, as if He cannot have plans of
His own that don’t fit our own.
Often in a love relationship, without realizing it, we take our beloved for granted; well, we sometimes do the same to God. Roy Schoeman, Bachelor of Science degree from MIT, graduate school, Harvard, magna cum laude, has noticed this precise trait among the Catholic-born. Himself a late convert from Judaism to Catholicism, he “lusted,” he said, for the Eucharist and went to Mass every day and couldn’t understand why there weren’t more Catholics doing as he did.
Spiritual merit
Often in a love relationship, without realizing it, we take our beloved for granted; well, we sometimes do the same to God
In the course of a successful career, mainly as Harvard Business School professor and as an author, Schoeman still felt empty and unfulfilled. Now, the only thing of value to him, he says, is working for spiritual merit in the spiritual world, the only reality that matters. He has given up his earthly career and embarked on a mission sharing his spiritual experiences and abiding faith that God’s will shall be done.
Indeed, I don’t know what good it is for anyone to ask God for anything if His will shall, after all, be done, and with the best outcome possible in any given situation. It doesn’t, of course, mean I don’t pray anymore to St. Anthony when I lose things. At any rate, sans mystical experience, as in Schoeman’s case, but only through God’s mercy and grace received through the Holy Eucharist, I rediscovered my own faith—similarly in my later years. I realized that whenever I fell on hard times or found myself in a difficult situation, no matter how bad the immediate results might seem to my human senses, things would turn out for the best in the long run.
Teresa of Avila, the great saint and doctor of the Church, sees our relationship with God as even more intimate than that. She wrote: “Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on Earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassionately on the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.”
How could we look at ourselves and live our lives in the same way after hearing that?