prayer of Dionysius the Areopagite, who reminds us of the need for contemplation: “It is really in silence that we learn the secrets of this darkness … which shines with dazzling light…. While remaining completely intangible and invisible, it fills minds that know how to close their eyes with the most beautiful splendours” (Theologia mystica, I, 1).

Holy Trinity Is Revealed at Jesus’ Baptism

Byzantine liturgy says, “Christ the Sun is washed” in it. This same liturgy, at Matins on the day of the Theophany or Epiphany of Christ, imagines a dialogue with the river: “What did you see, O Jordan, that disturbed you so deeply? I saw the Invisible One naked and I trembled. How can one not tremble and draw back before him? At his sight the angels trembled, the heavens leapt for joy, the earth shook, the sea turned back with all the visible and invisible beings. Christ appeared in the Jordan to bless all waters!”

Chromatius, a fourth-century Bishop of Aquileia, says in a homily on Baptism and the Holy Spirit: “Just as our first creation was the work of the Trinity, so our second creation is the work of the Trinity. The Father does nothing without the Son or the Holy Spirit, because the Father’s work is also the Son’s and the Son’s work is also the Holy Spirit’s. There is but one and same grace of the Trinity. Thus we are saved by the Trinity, since in the beginning we were created by the Trinity alone” (Sermon 18A).

The door of hope is always open to sinners

The Apostle Paul preached repentance. He says so in his address to King Agrippa, describing his apostolate as follows: “I declared” to everyone, “also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and perform deeds worthy of their repentance” (Acts 26:20; cf. 1 Thes 1:9-10)”. Paul taught that “God’s kindness is meant to lead [us] to repentance” (Rom 2:4). In the book of Revelation it is Christ himself who repeatedly urges repentance. Inspired by love (cf. Rv 3:19), the exhortation is vigorous and expresses all the urgency of repentance (cf. Rv 2:5, 16, 21-22; 3:3, 19), but is accompanied by wondrous promises of intimacy with the Saviour (cf. 3:20-21).

The door of hope is therefore always open to every sinner. “Man is not left alone to attempt, in a thousand often frustrated ways, an impossible ascent to heaven. There is a tabernacle of glory, which is the most holy person of Jesus the Lord, where the divine and the human meet in an embrace that can never be separated. The Word became flesh, like us in everything except sin. He pours divinity into the sick heart of humanity, and imbuing it with the Father’s Spirit enables it to become God through grace” (Orientale lumen, n. 15).

5th June 2019

St Boniface, Bishop & Martyr

World Environment Day

Lord, prepare us for spiritual warfare.

“Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock of which the holy Spirit has appointed you overseers, in which you tend the church of God that he acquired with his own blood.” (Acts 20: 28).

Wednesday of the 7th week of Easter. The above Scripture fits the life and mission of St Boniface (680 – 754), the Apostle to Germany whose feast the Church celebrates today. Born in England and sent to evangelize Germany, he was consecrated to the truth as the first Bishop of Germany. Boniface was martyred by the natives. The people who martyred him did not know that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. The German Church flourished to the benefit of Christianity.

What did Jesus mean when He prayed for us: “Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.” He prayed that our minds will remember and understand the wonderful truth He came to teach us. Baptism of the Holy Spirit brings us the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. It is also preparation for spiritual warfare. Do you not yet understand? Do you not remember that you too must suffer before you come to everlasting life?

But do not be afraid. Jesus our Captain and Leader has gone there before us and He tells us: “Have courage. I have overcome the world.” St Boniface too overcame the world. He is honored all over the world on his feast day.

St. Boniface, Pray for us.

WE CAN COMPARE God’s love to the sun. It is the sun’s nature to give warmth and light. The sun always shines, always radiates its warmth and light. The sun cannot act against its essential nature. Nor can we can stop it from shining. We can allow its light to fill our senses and make us warm; alternately, we can separate ourselves from its rays by putting up an umbrella or going indoors. But whatever we may do, we know that the sun does not change its essential nature.

In the same way, the God revealed to us in Jesus always loves. Like the shining sun, God’s love never ceases. In every moment of our lives, God sends out the warm rays of divine love. This is where the Holy Spirit comes in. If the sun represents God in Jesus Christ, we could say that the sun’s rays represent the Holy Spirit. So to be touched by the Holy Spirit is to be touched by God’s love. Likewise, to be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with God’s love.

In his Principle and Foundation, St. Ignatius exhorts us “make ourselves indifferent to all created things” so that we don’t prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, or a long life to a short life.

Wait, what?

We consider a long, healthy life, enough resources to live comfortably, and having others recognize our hard work as good things. Why shouldn’t we prefer these?

For St. Ignatius, the only thing truly good is that which brings praise, reverence, and service to God our Creator.

St. Paul shows us in today’s first reading what this can look like. He recognizes that preaching the kingdom will bring him imprisonment and hardships. And yet he does it anyway, fully convinced that God has sent him on mission.

We, too, are sent on a mission: to model our lives after Jesus, our Risen Lord. As we discern what that looks like for us, may we have the courage to say joyfully with Sts. Paul and Ignatius, “What will happen to me there, I do not know.”

WHEN GOD GIVES us the Holy Spirit, God gives us nothing less than God’s own self—an important emphasis. The Holy Spirit is God here today, present with you and me, right now. Some other metaphors and symbols used in the Bible to describe the Holy Spirit—words like water, fire, breath, wind—can sometimes suggest that the Holy Spirit is only “something divine.” But the Holy Spirit moves far beyond an impersonal “something” to be a “Someone.” When we cry out from our depths, “Come, Spirit, come,” we are crying out for the Lord to come and personally fill our lives.

3rd June 2019

We have never even heard there is anything like the Holy Spirit.

“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” (Acts 19: 2).

Monday of the 7th week of Easter. Why did Paul ask the Christians of Ephesus a blunt and embarrassing question? Probably Paul noticed something from their questions, words and actions that were dissonant with the experience of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Is this really the Blood of Christ? Asked a Eucharistic minister, a new convert to the Church.

How would you answer the question? “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” Not this way: “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit,” said the new Ephesian Christians. What difference does the Holy Spirit make in your life? Which of His gifts can you claim?

1. Wisdom

2.Understanding

3. Counsel

4. Fortitude

5. Knowledge

6. Piety

7. Fear of the Lord

Without the active indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it will be impossible to avoid serious sin and to live an effective Christian life. Was this what Paul observed in Ephesus?

Pope St John XXIII must have the Holy Spirit in mind when he advised: “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but what is still possible for you to do.” (Pope St John XXIII)

Saint Charles Lwanga and his companions (- 1885/7)

Many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, were killed by the Ugandan king Mwanga. Some of them were servants in the king’s palace or even his personal attendants. Charles Lwanga and his twenty-one companions (the youngest, Kizito, was only 13) were executed for being Christians, for rebuking the king for his debauchery and for murdering an Anglican missionary, for “praying from a book,” and for refusing to allow themselves to be ritually sodomised by the king. They died between 1885 and 1887. Most of them were burned alive in a group after being tortured.

Within a year of their deaths, the number of catechumens in the country quadrupled. St Charles Lwanga is the patron of Catholic Action and of black African youth, and the Ugandan martyrs’ feast day is a public holiday in Uganda.

THE SKEWED PRIORITIES of the culture we inhabit run deep. They are etched into the fabric of our decision-making processes and reinforced through a thousand messages and object lessons every day.

The morality of faithlessness and instant gratification pushes on our decision-making processes every time we engage the world on its terms. From pop-up ads to song lyrics to posters on the subway walls; from selfish drivers to a boss who lacks integrity and expects compromise; from the allure of another drink to the indecent propositions of a coworker. The world is broken and we live in it: end of story.

And so we dare not leave our faith at home or bottled up at church when we venture out. We dare not pretend that we can live the Christian life on our own. If Jesus had to say, “Not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39), then how much more do we need the power of God’s transforming presence in our day-to-day lives?