PAN DE LA SEMANA

13 th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) July 1, 2012 A busy week up till today had me running late for this reflection, writing it just after I celebrated the anticipated Mass for the 13 th Sunday. The readings today offer, at one and the same time, an air of resignation, and a whiff of hope – hope that is tied up with faith in a God of compassion, a God who is close to the broken-hearted, the suffering, and those in any form of pain. Take it from the lengthy Gospel account from Mark … First, there is the panicky Jairus, who mustered enough humility and trust to go begging from the Lord, asking him with earnestness: “Please, come lay your hands on her that she may get well and live.” But as if that were not enough to touch us all, here comes another heart-rending story of the woman who obviously had suffered enough, by any standard – bleeding continuously for all of 12 years! She did, not the unthinkable, but the expected – hope, even against hope – and believed ...

5 th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) February 5, 2012 I write even as I am in the midst of helping others make sense of their inner pains and hurts. During a lull in the processing that I conduct for a group of sisters and nurses engaged in helping those who are most excluded from mainstream society, I go to a different mode – the mode of the spiritual (as against the purely human, psychological mould) and reflect on the liturgy of the 5 th Sunday in Ordinary time, come February 5, 2012. But alas, there seems to be more of the same thing … at least at first blush. We hear Job with a long list of complaints and frustrations that sound very familiar to our very own experience. He does much more than just whine … he actually waxes desperate to a fault, as he declares in exasperation: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope. Remember that my life is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.” (first reading). The seeming hop...

3 rd Sunday of Easter (A) May 8, 2011   “Conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning.” (1 Pt 1:17) I have lived for considerable lengths of time in different places all over the world. The first part of my childhood was spent in two places – in the boonies of Cavite in Mendez, just a skip, a hop, and a jump away from its better known neighbor, Tagaytay City, and in the burgeoning place called part of “Greater Manila” then, Makati, Rizal! But then as God had obviously planned it, I lived for three solid years in Bacolor, Pampanga, followed by 7 straight years in Canlubang, Laguna. From then on, it was a case of sojourning in many other different places, although I had to stay in Canlubang an additional 13 years to those earlier seven years. The most memorable, of course, in retrospect and in relation to my topic at hand, was my – take note – “soggiorno” in Rome, Italy, for further studies. As I write, my current “soggiorno” is on the island of Gua...