Homily

      A very nice lady walked up to me after Mass one time. She said she finally went to this church where people traditionally go before traveling abroad. She’d heard so much about it in the past. A very important journey was coming up, so she finally decided to pilgrimage from Parañaque, eastwards, & hear Mass at said church. When it was her turn to receive communion, the lay minister looked at her…& told her to step aside. “Bawal ang sleeveless dito.” “Fr. Arnel, look at this dress. This was what I wore.” Her dress was very classy. All of her chest & back were covered. The hem fell just at her knees. Wala nga lang manggas. “That’s the first & the last time I’m going to that church, Father.”             Jesus was a devout Jew. He knew all the rules. As young as 12, he was talking about the Torah w/ rabbis, one time, at the Temple, where he lost all sense of time, & went 2 days missing! The boy Jesus loved the Torah that much that young! But when he grew up, he started giving off the vibe that he was violating the rules left & right, 613 to be exact, pursuant to the major 10. Breached the official physical distance from the sick, disabled, lepers, loose women, tax collectors, possessed, the dead (& the sleeveless). Worse, he was seen touching them, engaging them, engaging their demons (!). What undefiled, God-fearing Jew would do all that w/ people beyond the pale & past salvation? So into the Law once-upon-a-time, so out of it now, what happened?             Well, the people that the rules commanded to step aside became Jesus’ friends. That was his mission, in the best way he knew the Father: to make these people his friends. No one has greater love, he said, than to offer one’s life for one’s friends. Did Jesus love friends more than Law? No. Because on the same breath, he said, “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments & remain in his love.” He kept his Father’s commandments. He didn’t toss them out to put his own law in, no. In what looked like brazen law-breaking, Jesus was restoring the true spirit behind God’s Law, the original purpose for the Law, which was twofold: love God & love neighbor. The clearest sign of both? Laying your life down for them.             My students are tired of hearing me say that I feel very blessed to have been raised in a faith that loves a person, not just follow a book of laws; a kind, brave, loving, real person. We have a book, of course. But Scriptures aren’t just about rules, the what’s. They’re about Jesus of Nazareth, the Who. Through this real flesh-&-blood who, God revealed beyond reasonable doubt who he is, what he wants, & what he’s really like. If we still ever wonder who God is, what God wants, what God’s like, we’ve had the answer all this time. Jesus is who God is, what God wants, & what God is like, 100 percent, God’s complete mirror image, chip off the old block, the fullest revelation of the Father. Sure, we can argue, disagree, debate over the correct interpretation of Scriptures & the rules of our religion. But our final criterion is & must be a Person. And all our arguments & debates aside, our final guide question should be: what did Jesus do? Once we answer that question that should put an end to our doctrinal & moral altercations, we will realize that the highest value Jesus upheld was not who’s right about the law, but who in fact still loved. Love for people was always Jesus’ highest value. I dare say, love for people more than rules, principles, & personal projects.             When we find ourselves so attached to the what’s of our religion, we have got to check in case we’re already detached from the Who this religion is precisely all about. Often the pitfall of the lawful who slowly turn heartless: wanting always to be official, they turn officious. Will die Christian, Catholic, but will never be inconvenienced for the poor. Gunning passionately for salvation in heaven, but turning piously savage on earth.             Sana hindi mangyari sa atin ang nangyayari sa Israel at Hamas. Two contenders claiming God is on their side, proof-texted by books of laws & words of prophets. But the proof-text is a Person, some part of me sometimes wants to scream. And he ain’t your imam or your rabbi, or even Muhammad or Moses, w/ all due respect. The proof-text is Jesus of Nazareth…who happens to come from your neck of the woods, kalahi nyo’t kababayan ninyo!             In many wars today, global or personal, visible or invisible, we’re really willing to die for hate & w/ hatred. We often go wrong by hate, esp. when we think we’re doing it for love. That’s just absurd. Jesus assures us that we can rarely go wrong by love. But real love, per our Proof-text, is when we take the side of people & when we’re willing to lay down our lives for them, more than for ideology or orthodoxy. Jesus took a side; the side esp. of those who were told to step aside. And they became his friends: the helpless, the homeless, the joyless, penniless, right-less, & why not, the sleeveless!   Homily delivered by Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ 6th Sunday of Easter 2024 Cenacle Retreat House

An image I love, A song I hate, and my favorite Poem about God’s Mercy : Things that have helped me pray on Divine Mercy: Part 1: The Image I Love (from the film “Contact” starring Jodie Foster, Mathew Mcconaughey circa 1997, Sci-Fi, Science and Religion, Belief and unbelief) In the film, Jodie foster plays an astronomer, Dr. Ellie Arroway who heads a team of scientists / and together they are the first to decipher radio signals from intelligent beings from another galaxy. Together, she and her team begin to plan the first expedition to meet this alien race, but while she is the most qualified and deserving of scientists, she is barred from the mission by politicians who disqualify her on the basis of her being an unbeliever. Their thinking was that in sending a human being who would represent the human race to meet another sentient race for the first time, how could they send someone who didn’t believe in God when 75% of humanity did? If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching. But before we digress any further let me get to my favorite image which comes at the end of the movie. After her long and arduous struggles through the vastness of space, time and interiority, Dr. Arroway stares long past the desert horizon into a star-laden sunset and takes from the ground a bit of sand, and then gazes upon these particles of sand that sparkle in the palm of her hand. So beautifully, the image suggests that each planet is but like a grain of sand held tenderly in God’s hand. And the image speaks to me of how tiny we are in the scheme of things. How tiny we are in this scheme of things, and yet…this God, this force behind all the powers of the heavens and the earth, now alive in the person of the Risen Lord, is so patient with his disciples who are so slow to learn. Apparition after apparition he must teach them and encourage them little by little. Meeting them where they are in their fear, and leading them slowly to freedom and a deeper sense of mission. How tiny we are in this scheme of things, and yet this God to whom all the galaxies are but sand particles upon God’s hand, obliges Thomas in the pettiness of his pagtatampo. This Jesus who gave his all on the way of the cross and on the cross, has no qualms giving in to the demands of his emotional disciples. How tiny we are in the scheme of things, and yet our Lord makes Godself so available and so present to us who come to God in our day to day. With our needs and hopes and deepest desirings that God bothers to listen to and know so intimately and respond to. The enormity of God’s love set against our very smallness is Divine mercy. That is why this simple image of sand upon one’s hand is so powerful to me. Chapter 2: The song I came to hate : FATHER MERCY Of course there’s a funny story behind why I came to hate this beautiful song. And it is from my 30-day retreat at the SHN which ended just last March 7. Why did I come to hate it then? Kasi naman, yung choir po ng mga seminarista nung 2nd week of the exercises, EVERYDAY kinakanta yung FATHER MERCY! One day, FATHER MERCY, was the entrance song, another day it was the communion song, and other days it was the FINAL song. (Laughter) There I was, already long past praying on my sins and God’s mercy, already enjoying the second week which was mostly chill time with the Lord, hearing this song over and over.So I refused  in silent protest, to sing  “Father Mercy, Father Hear me, why have you gone from me? Broken, humbled, waiting hopeful…Father return to me.” But Why? Why was I refusing to sing this? Because I thought, it had been several days since I already felt so blessed by a good general confession and felt “freed” from my own personal sins and was in such a joyful state of the second week, so it seemed not to make sense to me anymore. BUT, after the 4th consecutive day that the choir sang this song, the 4th consecutive day that I was annoyed, I whispered to God at the end of the mass – baka naman po may sinasabi kayo sa akin ano po? And so prayed for openness of heart. After that, believe it or not… without getting into the gory details of my prayer periods, in several meditations that followed, my openness brought sin and God’s mercy back into the picture in a most unexpected and profoundly meaningful way. I began to see that even the context of the Call of the King was precisely a sinful world, and that Jesus’ public ministry was mercy in action. “Mercy” meant Jesus was returning love and forgiveness for all the sin and hurtfulness of humankind.  And I began to realize how selfish and narrow-minded I was in the past to be thinking only about me and my own sinfulness when praying “Lord Have Mercy”. Ang yabang ko to think that it made no more sense to me to say “Lord Have Mercy” at times when I already felt forgiven … when in fact the meaning and depth of any prayer beseeching the Lord’s mercy lies in our acknowledgement that we are part of a whole history of sin, and of a humanity that has been so deeply hurtful throughout all time.  Wars, man-made disasters, greed-induced famines, slavery,  human trafficking, genocide. These are not only of the past, but are on-going. And these are not only their sins, but ours too, all of humanity’s. And if not for God’s mercy, we might long all have been wiped out of existence by our own wrongdoings. Other than our smallness, the enormity of our

Grace: I beg for the grace of being able to enter into the joy and consolation of Jesus as he savors the victory of his risen life. (Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, 221) In a forum on the situation in Myanmar last November, a local development worker shared with us the story of a Myanmar mother who lost her son in a military bombing of their village. The worker showed a poignant picture of the mother walking behind her dead son’s body during a funeral entourage. The mother was desperately looking for a place to bury her son. They had to keep moving from one village to another due to the relentless bombing of villages and the refusal of some villages to accept the burial of someone not from their village due to customary practices. Thankfully, one village finally accepted her son’s burial. We were deeply shocked by the situation. The local aid worker went on to narrate that for development workers like her, the situation was getting riskier due to the increasing military harassment and threats to their lives. United Nations workers were leaving due to the grave dangers in fear for their lives. When asked why she remained and continued to work despite the dangers, she soberly said, “If I left who would take care of her people?” She went on to say that it was her faith that she desperately held on to give her courage and hope amid all the dangers and seeming hopelessness of the situation. These stories from Myanmar and other areas of conflict and war in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and Haiti continue to haunt us who long to see peace and human progress in our deeply troubled world. We long to make a difference in addressing the longstanding and intractable problems of poverty and deprivation, forced migration, climate change, impunity of dictators, human trafficking, and many more. For people in the margins like the Myanmar mother and development workers, where will their hope lie? For the young people of Myanmar who are now being compulsorily conscripted into the military to fight their people, where will they find hope? There are no easy answers. As I reflected on the situation of Myanmar and similar situations of seeming hopelessness, I recalled a beautiful article by James Hanvey on Holy Saturday entitled, “Waiting to Cross Over.” He says that Holy Saturday is not a day in-between between Good Friday and Easter Sunday without any value of its own. It is a day that resists all of our attempts to understand it, but nonetheless, we must ‘live in the realities of Holy Saturday’. In the article, he says, “Only in the silence of Holy Saturday can we see the true terror of the cross. It exposes the ultimate source of the secular gods’ power – the god of this world, the god of despair; the god who can crucify God… If we have the courage to place our ear to the silence of Holy Saturday we will hear a savage laughter. It is the gods of this world laughing at our hope for a Saviour.” He goes on to say, “If we can stay in this strange and desolate place waiting, our spiritual eyes become accustomed to this other dimension. We will begin to discern that it has brought us to a way that only Christ has opened up. In the very waiting and living in our own powerlessness, we have already faced the terror of the instruments, the torture, the primal fear that laid its claim upon us. If only we can stay there waiting we will begin to understand that this silence and emptiness is not God’s powerlessness, (not) his death – but his Sabbath: it is an end; it is a completion and it is also a new beginning. It is truly a ‘holy’ Saturday, not an interlude but a hallowing of all of our times of waiting. Without it we would never see into the depths of Good Friday or adjust our understanding to grasp the magnitude and meaning of Easter morning.” We, all of us, are mostly in the time of Holy Saturday in our lives, in the here and not yet of our salvation. The work of salvation has been completed in the definitive act of Jesus’ death and resurrection. And yet, we know that our salvation in Jesus Christ is still being worked out in our lives as we commit ourselves to live the death and resurrection of Jesus in our daily lives. Let me end by sharing with you a quote from Pope Francis in his opening address to the Jesuits of the General Congregation 36 when he told them: ask persistently for consolation. He says, “In the Exercises, Ignatius asks his companions to contemplate “the task of consolation” as something specific to the Resurrected Christ. (Spiritual Exercises, 224) It is the specific task of the Society to console the Christian faithful and to help them in their discernment so that the enemy of human nature does not distract us from joy: the joy of evangelizing, the joy of the family, the joy of the Church, the joy of creation… Let us never be robbed of that joy, neither through discouragement when faced with the great measure of evil in the world and misunderstandings among those who intend to do good, nor let it be replaced with vain joys that are easily bought and sold in any shop.” As we face our world badly marred by the dark forces of sin, hatred, and division, we are invited at Easter to beg for the grace to enter into the joy and consolation of the Risen Jesus. We are reminded that it is not a joy we can obtain through sheer human will or effort. It is a gift that can only come when we allow God to make real his Son’s passion and death in our lives through walking with and committing ourselves to our suffering sisters

“They brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.” The Jews didn’t see those two as separate, you know. If you were ill at that time, disabled, or behaviorally aberrant, a demon was possessing you & God was punishing you at the same time, pure & simple. The more serious your affliction, the graver your sin. It’s absurd, even funny, to assume that these days. Imagine, kung trinangkaso ka, o sinisikmura, o inatake sa puso, ay, dinedemonyo ka kasi may kasalanan kang ginawa. But in Israel, people took that for granted.             Must’ve been a sight to behold, sisters & brothers: the whole town gathered at the door, the Gospel says, at evening after sunset; Jesus laying hands upon head after head; Jesus whispering into ear after ear, “Come out of this man, this poor child, this mother;” muted gasps of surprise & joy, watered by tears.             Sisters & brothers, did Jesus himself believe that illness & disability were sin & demon-driven? Well, since he was a very devout Jew, he must’ve. At the back of his head, he must’ve seen the afflicted as sinners, sure. But that was why he knew that people came for healing because they wanted to be forgiven. And Jesus honored that. There was no illness so severe Jesus couldn’t heal it. Therefore, there was no sin so grave, he refused to forgive it. How could he refuse? If the blind weren’t led in or the paralyzed carried over, they limped, hobbled, or crawled to him, after dark! They were desperate for God’s forgiveness. Well, it was cooler at night, for sure. But I bet, the darkness was also a friendly shroud from public attention & shame. May sakit ka na nga, kahihiyan ka pa sa lipunan. Sa imagination ko tuloy, parang naging confessional box ‘yung bahay kung saan naro’n si Hesus. People came in the dark to expose their demons to the Light…of the World, & exposing them, to be rid of them. Even if only to Jesus & to their fellow sinners in what was to be the last darkest night of their lives because tomorrow would be a brand new day.             Speaking of exposing demons, a little challenge I often face as a confessor is when some penitents end up exposing not their own “demons,” but their demon of a mother-in-law, their demon of a neighbor, ang demonyong ex-husband, etc. I’m sure they’re not initially aware of it. The sacrament of reconciliation, after all, should be safe space for unburdening. But I’d had to verrrry gently remind them, that since this was their confession (I mean, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,”) it’s our demons we want exposed & dealt with. And it’s very funny because after saying that, & asking, “So, what sins do we wish to confess today po?” Some end up saying, “Umm, wala naman ako masyadong kasalanan, Father!”             Speaking of not exposing their own demons, the 5 CEO’s of social media were grilled by the US Senate 3 days ago. Did you see some clips? They were made to answer for online negligence that bled into runaway sextortion, drug dealing, sexual predation, peddling of unrealistic beauty standards which triggered depression, eating disorders, & most tragically, suicide…of youth. Perfect examples of illness & disabilities caused by sin, if I may say so. Despite their own employees sounding alarms, the CEOs put them on mute. Zuckerberg, for one, refused recommendations to hire more employees who could code stricter guardrails & algorithms for young users. And when a senator asked him, “Have you compensated any of the victims? Don’t you think they deserve compensation for what your platform has done? Are you willing to set up a fund from your own money, you’re a billionaire, to compensate these people?” Zuckerberg? Silence…that screamed no. His apology a few moments later was too little, too late, & limp. Another senator asked the CEOs one by one if they would support the Earn It Act which incriminates tech companies complicit in child sex abuse & exploitation. It was unbelievable. They all answered with a spin. ‘Yun bang sagot-pulitiko. Smooth-spoken, silver-tongued, sounding like a yes. But it was really, “No.” The image in my head was a stone wall painted with a delightful nature scene.             The platforms that enlighten our minds, through the gadgets that light up our faces—they also traffic darkness. We, grown-ups, have often fallen for the dark that dresses up as light. Can you imagine the youth, how much more readily, more gladly they can be deceived? Incidentally, how long does it take our kids to look away from their gadgets when we want their attention? If they don’t, do we insist that they do? Or do we just say, “Oh, I’ll leave them alone. At least they’re not noisy, making a mess, strangling each other, so I can work in peace & quiet”? In the peace & quiet of our homes where we & our kids no longer talk much, whom are we listening to? Who’s got our full & unflinching attention? See, sisters & brothers, whether in Senate halls, billionaire’s suites, or just our humble homes, it’s really true: evil’s enduring modus operandi is deception. That’s what makes us sin in ways that make us sick. But when darkness falls, we already know where to go. We already know whom to seek. Doesn’t matter if we limp over, hobble, or crawl. We just go. For there is no illness he cannot heal, no emptiness he cannot nourish, no sin he will not forgive. We just have to look away from our gadgets & go.   Homily delivered by Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time Cenacle Retreat House

“God created human beings to praise, reverence and serve God and by doing this, to save their souls.” Anyone who has made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius will recognize that right away as the preliminary prayer of the Saint or what he calls the first principle and foundation. I have to admit though that when I first encountered that, I was taken aback and misunderstood it. I reacted negatively. I thought, this God of Ignatius was so needful of attention. He created human beings just so they can praise, worship and serve him like slaves. Isn’t he being too narcissistic, too egoistic and too self-referential. Of course, now I know better. As they say, I am older and wiser. I remember all this, my initial incursions into the spiritual exercises, because of the Gospel we’ve read today. Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything we’ve got. And the second one is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Like many, I have had no problem with the second one. As a social activist in my youth, I have always advocated for love of neighbor in terms of social justice, basic services for the poor, human rights, etc. And as for the first one, the greatest commandment, I have always seen it from the viewpoint of the second one. You love God whom you do not see in your neighbor whom you see. But a Jesuit early on corrected me. No. You have to take on God separately. Yes, you find him in his creatures but he is more than your neighbor and creation. You seek him out in prayer, in silence, in the Bible, in the sacraments, in his daily engagements with you. And so, as Jesus tells us today, you have to love God, as he is, for who he is, in himself. That is settled. God is an entity unto himself, and must be reckoned with, as it were, in his own terms. But still I struggle with the order of priority. Why is loving him the greatest of all commandments. In other words, why should he go first? Why should we love him first? I have a friend. He got married to a beautiful and loving wife and they had three children. I had never seen him so happy, so contented with his life. And he would say that literally. He had a perfect wife, a perfect life. Admittedly though, God was not part of that life, except for the routinary Sunday mass. He was never spiritual or religious, but he was nonetheless a very kind and generous person. But one day, his wife got terribly sick, and in just a few months, passed away. My friend understandably went through depression; but when I spoke with him after some time, he said, only when his wife had passed away that he discovered God, that life was this enormous mystery bigger than himself, his wife, his family, and at the center of all of that is God. He thought life ended when he lost his wife; but it continued, life, love continued. Because God remains, he said. What my friend discovered or realized is what philosophers have been telling us about God. God is the very ground of everything. He is being itself, life itself, beauty itself, love itself. And creatures like us only participate in God’s very life. And so to understand ourselves, our world, we must deal with him, with mystery. And that is the reason why he comes first. When Jesus tells us to love God first, it sounds a command, an order, a summons. In fact, as many of us know as we get older, he is merely sharing with us the deep truth about our lives. We love God first, because he is at the center, the core of our very lives, our very selves, our very existence. He is alpha and omega. He is not one other being competing for our love, but Being itself, life itself, love itself.   Homily delivered by Fr. Emmanuel “Nono” Alfonso, SJ 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time 29 October 2023 Cenacle Retreat House