The Miracle That Is The Church

I recently blessed a newly opened office space, my first in Cebu, in the uptown area where I met the executives of the company. After the blessing, I was invited to lunch where I ate with chief officers of the company, most of them looked like veteran business people. Being man of the cloth, my presence drew conversations towards religion and the faith.

It was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) who made an interesting remark. “Jesus Christ is the best CEO,” he said. “Look, the Church still stands today even after 2,000 years.” Human institutions, no matter how powerful, have all faded in history but not the Church. “Despite the scandals and even the corruption inside the Church, it still continues,” he added. I could not help but blurt out, “that is what we call grace.”

It was interesting for me because it was a layman who made the statement, and a man deeply involved in business. When we start to think that faith has no place in business, we need to think again. There are more and more Christians who strive hard to live their faith in the business world.

But thinking about it again, Jesus did not organize the Church. He did not group the apostles into dioceses and assign them territories. What He did was form a community around Him. It was a community that became part of His Body. It was the Holy Spirit that breathed life into that Body. He gave it organization over time, showered it with many charisms and set it on fire. It became diverse but remained one. It is both the work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The Church still stands because of God’s grace. Being an action of God’s grace, it is rightly a miracle.

Love Made To Be Touched

St. John Bosco in his letter from Rome writes, “ the youngsters should not only be loved, but that they themselves should know that they are loved.” This pedagogical wisdom underlines the human need to feel concrete love. Love, after all, is not an abstract concept nor is just a subjective feeling. Love is an immersive reality that seeks to embrace a human person and seeks to lift him to a higher consciousness and existence.

God knows this perfectly and so the Father, in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4), sent His Son into the world so that the Father’s love may have a face, may be touched, and may be embraced. The Feast of the Annunciation is the celebration of this mystery. Through the proclamation of the Angel Gabriel unto the Virgin Mary and her subsequent assent to God’s invitation, the Word became man in her womb. It is the beginning of humanity’s assent towards God. It was God’s condescending act towards humanity. In this event, God stooped down to not only love humanity but they themselves know that they are loved with a Love that is made incarnate.

Our human experience has always taught us that love is not only said, it must be felt, must be given time. This is where the connecting power of the internet and technology finds its limit. Nothing compares to the tactile experience of love. The human heart feels loved when it is touched. The great mystery of God’s incarnation of the womb of Mary, when He stripped Himself of His glory to don our weak humanity, is God’s own invitation for us. He invites us to feel His love in the person of Jesus. He invites us to make others feel His love through our touch.

The Fire of Curiosity

We were having our practices inside the church in preparation for the Easter Vigil when the frantic shouts of people outside stopped us. “Sunog! Sunog!” was the shout. Apparently, a fire just erupted in one of the sitios in Pasil. This time it was near the convent of the Missionaries of Charity sisters. Just last January 14, 2018, a fire raged in another section of the parish, in Lawis, robbing 300 families of their homes. Fire can spread easily in this neighborhood since most of the homes are built very near each other and the houses are made of light and combustible materials.

Interestingly, the Knights of the Altar (or KOA) members dashed towards the church side door towards where the shout was coming from. Unlike the world of common sense, most people in Pasil where I grew up would rather see the spectacle of the fire than run for their lives. They say fire lit man’s imagination. It still does so with a Pasilanon’s curiosity. For your curiosity’s sake, the fire was immediately put out even before the first responders from the fire department came.

This short anecdote reminded me of Jose Rizal’s story about the moth and the candle flame. Too often we come close to the light that has bedazzled and enthralled us. Our curiosity gets the best of us. Young people who start with experimentation end up enslaved to addiction to drugs, alcohol, and smoking. It is however responsible of many more good things for humanity in the many discoveries and inventions that the curious have achieved.

As we celebrate the Easter Octave this week, there is one Light that we still need to appreciate and get close to. There is still one Flame that can engulf us with passion and power without consuming us, just like the fire that Moses saw on Sinai. May the fire and light of Easter also captivate our curiosity, so we could get closer to our Savior.