A holy puzzle

(The following is my column in this week's issue of the CBCP Monitor)  News coverage these days may not be as impartial and respectable as I would want it to be, but sometimes it is valuable for its power to send me down to my knees.  Absorbing the news from all media lengthens my to-pray-for list.   For instance, I’ve recently added Senator Bong and Senator Jinggoy to that list.  For all the Masses offered and prayers said on their behalf, on top of the loyalty of their followers, and their occasional expressions of faith in God, they are still finding it extremely difficult to accept their lot in this politicking world—to put up with suffocating heat in their quarters that are also rat-and-roach infested.  Of course, they are merely accused, so why subject them to such punishment?  Correct.  But, as believers in God that they claim to be, can they not rely on their faith to see their situation from a loftier point of view?

Guilty or innocent they have much to be grateful for: IF indeed they are plunderers, they deserve even worse—why should they be given anything the other prisoners are being deprived of?  They should be thankful that life is now offering them a chance to be actually in solidarity with the poorest of the poor—no aircon, no TV, no cell phone, no gadgets, et al.  They should be thankful they have food at all, sanitary toilets, and living quarters big enough for five poor families.  Perhaps after this experience they would feel more for the poor they have deprived of their rightful conveniences.  But IF they are innocent of the charges leveled against them, then, won’t even the memory of all the communion hosts they have taken stir in them an ineffable sense of gratitude for the undeserved persecution and deprivation because it means they are being granted the privilege to participate in our Lord Jesus’ suffering.  Wasn’t Jesus innocent when He was sent to die on the cross?

     The communion queues at our churches are unbelievably long.  I wonder how this helps us as a nation to transcend our mediocrity.  Our thoughts are shallow, our ambitions selfish, our level of contentment incredibly cheap and low; and we cannot seem to be that concerned about affairs outside of our puny fences.  China and the United States are deploying submarines in our waters and yet we care more about what happens to the teleserye characters.  A considerable percentage of our rural

areas have no clean drinking water and adequate electricity and yet our technocrats are aiming to send our own satellite in outer space.  We are supposedly looked up to as a faithful Catholic Christian nation in this part of the world and yet… (finish the sentence).

     At the risk of sounding simplistic, I dare say that there is something amiss about the way we regard the Body and Blood of Christ that we ingest at least weekly.  

     I have a confession to make.  As a writer and occasional speaker I find this “thing” about “eating my flesh and drinking my blood” as one of the hardest truths to convey to people.  When it comes to this beautiful and profound truth of the Body and Blood of Christ, people hunger in silence for explanations. Many of those I meet at retreats or seminars admit that while they may be taking communion regularly, and do believe that they are taking no less than the Body and Blood of Christ itself in the form of a wafer, they still want to put a handle to their beliefs, to have something solid to say, especially as non-believers chide them about Jesus making of them cannibals in a sense.

     A question on an article of faith is not something that can be answered like 2 + 2 = 4, but being virtually puzzled, they wish for answers that the mind can endorse.  They are not satisfied being reminded of the eminent Thomas Aquinas’ words—“For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible”—particularly now when young people want absolute certainty and are battered from all sides by conflicting doctrines, individualism, and godless ideologies. 

     People commonly associate faith with miracles such as instant healing or desperate prayers granted, hardly aware that the most effective faith is trusting God so much each day that it makes us welcome our every problem as His way of showing us how He operates in our life.

Faith comes when an external fact pierces our heart of hearts and seizes us there; as the work of the Spirit it cannot be rushed, and so we pray to be patient toward the holy puzzles dwelling in our being, while we try to quietly love our doubts and questions themselves.

     If we only believed what faith in the Body and Blood of Christ can do in us and in our lives—we would crave that “little white host” each day, before we are consumed by anxieties over earning a living or living in style.  The Eucharist is not just us receiving His Body and Blood—it is also Him offering Himself to us.  If those half-hearted about the truth of Christ’s Body and Blood would just

stay long enough in the silence of their hunger, they will find the answers they are seeking.

     I’m not sure I’m making sense—or if my favorite Theology professor Fr. Jesus Merino would turn in his grave over my volubility—but it’s my truth I tell, and I tell it not to convince nonbelievers but to affirm those who do know what Christ’s Body and Blood is.  And that’s the truth.

Good News, Bad News

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Good News.  Morality in Media, Inc.  (MIM) last June 10 reported that “Google… just announced it is stopping all advertisements for pornography as well as all ads that link to sexually explicit websites… Google also agreed to stop offering sexually explicit apps in their phone app store, Google Play.”  Calling the transformation a David and Goliath story, MIM says that for two years it placed Google on its “Dirty Dozen List” of top pornography facilitators in America, and “launched a public campaign to get thousands of ordinary citizens to contact Google by email and phone and urge the company to get out of the porn business for the sake of our children and families.”  In addition to that the MIM met with the Google executives, virtually waving the banner for the cause of defending dignity.  MIM discovered, too, that Google executives also have children and just as concerned as MIM executives are about the influence of pornography on their children.

      Bad News. Also on June 10, the Huffington Post U.K. said “A very damaged 13-year-old girl who was impregnated by a 14-year-old boy was

ordered to have an abortion by Sir James Munby, Britain’s most senior family judge.  The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, initially wanted to keep her baby, but because she was considered mentally incompetent, was forced to have her child dismembered, decapitated, and disemboweled by the medical establishment.”  The report said that in spite of the fact that the court was informed that she “had set her mind against a termination,” Sir Munby responded that, “Leaving to one side her own wishes and feelings, the preponderance of all the evidence is clear that it would be in her best interests to have a termination.” Munby demanded the abortion for this girl against the wishes of medical experts testifying at the trial, who warned that, “If the pregnancy were terminated I believe that this would cause considerable harm to this young girl, who would see it as an assault….Continuing the pregnancy…may have a less detrimental effect on her given her current circumstances.”  The psychiatrist charged with evaluating her also warned that the girl would fully understand what the abortion entailed, and told the judge that based on her “unambiguous” opposition to having an abortion, she should not be forced to have one.  Sir Munby’s response to the girl’s refusal and the testimony of medical experts and her psychiatrist, according to the report, was “It was clearly appropriate for me to supply the necessary consent to enable the termination to proceed.”

      Good News.   Associated Press announced also on June 10 that two girls born as conjoined twins 18 years ago are now co-valedictorians at the Lutheran High North in Houston, Texas.  Caitlin and Emily Copeland were born fused at the chest, liver and bile ducts, but not the heart, thus, doctors were able to successfully perform a separation surgery.  Once they were separated at 10 months of age, the twins then began to prosper.  Pregnancy with conjoined twins is a phenomenon that occurs once in every 200,000 live births; between 40 percent and 60 percent are stillborn, and some 35 percent survive one day.  Now beaming teenagers looking forward to college, Caitlin and Emily celebrated on their 18^th birthday the success of the surgery, the “blessing” that separated them. “I think for anyone it’s exciting to get to 18, but in particular for us I think it’s just a really big blessing that we got to 18, considering what could have happened,” Caitlin said.

      Bad News.  On the same day, Reuters published a review of more than 100 court filings during the past year, showing “that at least 30 of the country’s largest firms are representing challengers to state laws banning same-sex marriage. Not a single member of the Am Law 200, a commonly used ranking of the largest U.S. firms by revenue, is defending gay marriage prohibitions.  Software company Mozilla’s CEO, Brendan Eich, resigned in April after being denounced by gay marriage supporters for a donation he had made in support of California's since-overturned gay marriage ban. Now in a similar vein, attorneys at major law firms are getting the message that if they want to litigate against gay marriage they should do so elsewhere.” Same-sex marriage is legal in 19 of the 50 U.S. states, and in the District of Columbia, the report stated.  The US Supreme Court, in the milestone U.S. v. Windsor case, struck down last year a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman for purposes of federal benefits. Emboldened by that decision, gay and lesbian couples have launched at least 70 lawsuits calling for a broader right, and three cases have been heard by federal appeals courts, the review said.

      Good News and Bad News.  It seems the fight between Good and Bad is here to stay, whether in real life or in fairy tales.  Good news ring of hope, bad news sound alarm calls.  On the surface of things, the baddies appear to be winning as the goodies seem bullied to numbness.  How will children exploited for cyber porn regard their bodies in time?  What if abortion is eventually railroaded into law in this country? What if the vociferous “freedom to marry” supporters prevail and government leaders succumb to foreign pressure?  The powerful want to outlaw God and shun morality.  Not all things legal are moral but  “new normal” advocates want to make the immoral legal.

     

No one can take down a morally upright person, but perversion in a person is suicidal, and perversion in a race is genocidal.  “Superpowers” who oppress the poor and ignorant, hedonists who advocate sex-for-pleasure, seducers who rob the young of their innocence, people who kill the unborn and assist the elderly’s suicides—all of them are fighting for laws that will eventually lead to their extinction.  But those who love God and make the effort to unite their will to His will prevail.  And that’s the truth.