There was a time before I was ordained when religious life became a particularly rough & stormy ride. I would write my mom about them, but careful to not laden her with details she might either not understand or feel totally helpless about. And mom’s replies were kilometric! They were so long that I don’t remember most of what they said. But there was one thing she did write about the storms in my life, something that would stay with me for a long, long time. “Anak, kapag lagi ka na lang masaya sa buhay, baka hindi mo na kailanganin ang Diyos.” That’s Mom’s spirituality at its rawest & deepest, without the advantage of any philosophical or theological education. “Anak, if your life is absolutely worry-free, you might not feel the need for God anymore.”
When we were called to religious life, we knew full well that it was pretty much a yes especially to self-abnegation—abnegation of our privilege to ownership, of our self-seeking desires, of our self-directed will. Do you remember how we felt profound freedom & consolation in living our vows as we began the first few years in religious life? It was a promise fulfilled, wasn’t it, that sense of freedom, consolation, & simplicity? No wonder, novitiate years are always the sweetest years. Everyone’s on the same page, especially regarding self-surrender. We really had only God & each other as our tanging yaman.
Then, we grow older in religious life. We’re convinced that it is all because of God’s grace, & nothing else, that we’re decently furnished all that we need to be effective in ministry—that we’re given fish when we need fish, & not a snake, that we’re given an egg when we need an egg, & not a scorpion. Really, what we’ve asked for, we’ve pretty much been given. As we seek, so have we found, pretty much. And many, many doors have opened before we even begin knocking. Now, how’s that for God’s hundredfold? You & I are living, breathing testimony to the fact that no self-abnegation of ours can ever outdo God’s generosity. In other words, our Father has given us this day, & every day, our daily bread, & much more besides, even during times that we don’t deserve them. We gave him our yes, but he ended up losing nearly all of his no’s. Because even his no is a concealed yes—& always to our advantage. How’s that for divine self-abnegation, for God putting Godself at our disposal?
However, I think it’s a very human turn of character to get a little “spoiled” by God’s goodness. To become a little too comfortable—with ownership, with our desires, with our own will. In fact, I’d dare say, never mind being too comfortable with ownership or desires—so long as our renunciation of will remains the stronghold of our community life, our charism. But as it happens in many religious communities including mine, as we go further & longer into religious life, the personal will hardens as the last bastion we abnegate, if at all. It’s captain? Our ego. In other words, more than the material or the physical, it’s the spiritual poverty we finally, if inadvertently, un-friend.
And I hear my mom say, “Anak, kung lagi ka na lang masaya, baka hindi mo na kailanganin ang Diyos.” We certainly do not want to give up being desperate for God, do we? Wouldn’t we want to always be desperate for God? To need God desperately is a familiar place for us. It’s a mysterious continuum of freedom & dependence. To need God desperately is a curious tango between consolation & distress, a breath-taking vitality of emptiness & fulfillment. Spiritual poverty keeps our spirit alive! In other words, whereas all our needs are now nicely furnished, unless we will to be spiritually poor, then maybe mom might be right, baka hindi na natin kailanganin ang Diyos.
Maybe the Our Father is a prayer of constant desperation, of spiritual poverty. When we ask God’s kingdom to come, or that his will be done; when we ask for bread, for forgiveness, for the capacity to forgive; & when we profess that left to ourselves, we will surely be complicit to temptation & evil…when we say all that, maybe we are telling our Father how desperate we are for him. Or maybe we will realize how no longer desperate we are for him. When his disciples asked our Lord to teach them how to pray, maybe that one prayer he wanted them to say was a prayer of desperation. For don’t you think Jesus wants us to always be desperate for God, so that we keep asking, & seeking, & knocking, the way we did, once-upon-a-time, when we answered God’s call to a life of self-abnegation?
I don’t know, maybe Jesus meant for us to be constantly spiritually poor. Maybe this was what he felt all his life as the Father’s faithful son. For when we are spiritually poor, it must be God himself who hollows out an emptiness in our hearts, so that he can in turn fill it & hallow it with himself. Maybe.
(Homily given by Fr. Arnel Aquino, S.J, at the Cenacle Retreat House on July 23, 2016, anticipated 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time.)