PAN DE LA SEMANA

--> [BREAKING THE BREAD OF GOD’S WORD –  6 th Sunday of Easter B] May 10, 2015 TRIPLE A FOR LOVE! David Guetta echoes an old line from an old idea … “I can’t believe what I did for love!” Everyone who gets to read this would agree. You all do great things out of love. You go out of your way everyday in the name of love. You endure so many pains because of love … exactly like Guetta says: “Stitch myself up and I’d do it again … I can’t believe what I did for love.” Mothers do it every time. They stitch more than torn clothes. They hold the family together … again, out of love. Today, only the one deeply steeped in denial would say otherwise … It is Love Sunday today! And more than that, love is an idea so old and so fresh … and so effective! I am old enough to know just how important mother’s love is. I saw it first hand in my own life experience, both directly and vicariously. I see it everyday in my ...

3 rd Sunday of Lent (B) March 8, 2015 WHAT WE PROCLAIM!          Let us begin with an assertion as blunt and as clear as that one of St. Paul: “We proclaim Christ crucified!” There, too, is an assertion apparently as clear as the foregoing, found in the first reading from Exodus 20: “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below, or in the waters beneath the earth.” Now the Gospel passage has one more: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” Taken apart by themselves, and taken out of context, they sure are good sound bites for anyone with an agenda. The first in the list above could make a case for those who believe that Christian life ought to be one that is meant to be sour and dour, and one in which there is no room for joy and gladness and anything that is patently “worldly.” The second is the classical passage of those who endlessly ber...

11 th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C June 19, 2013 GRACE, FORGIVENESS, LOVE I was reminded of that movie some two years back: Eat, Pray, Love …   It is a story of a confused woman who went around the world trying to rediscover herself, and eventually came home to herself, and to relative peace of mind and heart by eating well in Italy, praying deeply in India, and finding what was supposed to be true love in Bali, Indonesia. So, what does this have to do with today’s readings? Not much, you say? But my Catholic, sacramental imagination shows me some important connections … Allow me to explain … Well, for a start, it was a woman that was behind the indiscretions of David. He wiggled his way to be able to do what he desired – and sinned – big time! Enough connection for you? But the gospel speaks of another woman … confused? Probably! … sinful? Definitely! In search for something great and noble? Absolutely! There you hav...

5 th Sunday of Easter Year C Apri 28, 2013 LOVE. SCARS. NEW. GLORY I start with a word puzzle. Mysterious. Cryptic. Self-contradictory … Love. Scars. New. Glory. Something new and something old; something that hurts and something that scars; something that wounds, but something that renews, and leads to the ultimate newness – glory with God ever ancient, ever new! This is the theme of today’s readings, 5 th Sunday of Easter. It’s an old story … if you change your life drastically, for the better that is, there will be haters and naysayers, doubters and cheerers, people who will drag you down, and people who will prop you up. This is what happened to Paul and Barnabas. Paul was an old hat at persecuting the Church. He was one difficult guy who made it even more difficult for the early followers of the Lord. But something new and something great happened to him. He was renewed and changed by a mystical experience. Th...

25 th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) Sept 18, 2011 There is some urgency in the tone with which Isaiah writes. “Seek the Lord,” he says, “while he may be found.” At first blush, he seems to tell us, to lose no time and do the most important thing – to find God, and repent: “Let the scoundrel forsake his ways, and the wicked his thoughts.” For Paul however, in his letter to the Philippians, time becomes secondary and takes a back seat to the same focus of Isaiah, and that is, finding the Lord, and being with Christ. When one finds Christ, everything, including earthly material time, takes the back seat. “For to me,” he writes, “life is Christ, and death is gain.” I write while on break together with my siblings (or what remains of us after both parents and others have all passed on) – a much awaited and, I should say, much deserved trip to Europe. We do this actually in honor and homage of both our parents whose hard work and vision made it possible for all six of us surviving siblin...

23 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) September 4, 2011 A lot of neonatal studies (research done on newly born babies) has shown that bonding with a primary caregiver, usually the biological mother, seals the future emotional well-being of the child in many and far-ranging ways. Emotional deficits happen where bonding does not take place at the right time, in the right doses, as it were. Other studies show just how much more powerful and solid that bonding is when both biological parents are there for the child, physically and psychologically. Two makes for a powerful pair. But everyone knows this is not just a matter of putting one and one together to make two.   It has to do with what goes on between those two, what transpires between those individuals, and what type and depth of bonding ensues between father and mother. Two may make a formidable pair, but love between the two, that is shared with the child is ultimately what seals the child’s future adjustmen...

6th Day of Simbang Gabi / Misa de Gallo Monday of the 4th Week of Advent – Year C December 21, 2009 Readings: Sg 2:8-14 / Lk 1:39-45 Love is pure energy. It flames. It burns. It energizes even as it consumes. It purifies even as it cauterizes. Such is the tenor of one of the Bible’s more intriguing books – the Song of Solomon! It sounds almost like soft porn. It is actually a paean to God’s love couched in words, symbols, and images that would speak to anyone whose heart has ever beaten like mad in the exhilarating experience of first love. There is palpable excitement in the language – a deep sense of wide-eyed anticipation and runaway expectation … “Hark, my lover – here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills!” The poetry and the pulsating rhythm are both unmistakable. The image and rhythm build to a climax … they almost make the image of the gamboling gazelle come out alive in the page we are reading. I can’t help as I write, but hum in my head Carey Land...

Catholic Homily / Sunday Reflection 6th Sunday of Easter May 17, 2009 One group among several that I admire is Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), a group of volunteer doctors and health workers who offer a portion of their otherwise most productive years doing service where they are needed most in any portion of the globe, with absolutely no consideration given to personal gain of any sort whatsoever, including monetary. They serve regardless of political, economic, religious and other affiliations and allegiances people may have. They just serve and help those who are needy of medical help. Period… Anywhere… Everywhere... To whomever. Universal may be the right word to use with regard to the scope of the help they are willing to give – and, in fact, give. As universal as the scope of God’s salvific love for His people. As universal as the reality of God’s call which He gives to all His creatures. Today’s first reading shows this universality of God’s choice and God’...

Catholic Homily / Sunday Reflection 3rd Sunday of Lent - Year B March 15, 2009 We humans seem to have it in our heads clearly enough… the answer to evil is retribution. Anybody guilty of doing wrong ought to be punished. The more impulsive among us would demand immediate retribution, as in the case of capital punishment for “heinous crimes.” The more pacifist among us, especially those whose faiths have been hijacked by New Age doctrine would rather believe that the evil one does already has a built-in retribution mechanism in the very act itself. What goes around comes around, and it would just be a matter of time when karmic retribution would haunt the doer of the evil deed, so they say. The former takes the act of retribution actively into one’s own hands… “an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth”… Revenge, many times violent, is the way to go for these people who think that every action demands an equal, (more often, it is unequal) and opposite reaction. This is behind the populari...

Catholic Homily/Sunday Reflection 23rd Sunday Year A September 7, 2008 Readings: Ez 33:7-9 / Rom 13:8-10 / Mk 18:15-20 N.B. I am advancing this post for the 23rd Sunday as I am leaving tonight for Guam and I am not sure whether I can have access to the web. The postmodern, globalized world that prizes individualism, personal success and achievement above most everything else, causes many people to drift apart from one another. As a priest, having been exposed to a relative variety of situations in different places, one thing I realize is the fact that even in very small externally tightly packed enclaves within subdivisions and posh villages, or simple barrios all over the country, there is a growing phenomenon of communities becoming gradually estranged from each other. Gone are the days of communities whose members know exactly what is going on with each other’s families, when everybody’s concern is everybody’s business, when there is a lot of “feeling for” others in a lot of ways. ...