PARADOXICAL

Can you countenance these thoughts?

A Lenten special

I just love reading the lives of the saints and the mystics because theirs are the kind of life stories that shock me out of my existing mindset or mood-for-the-moment. Do you really, really, really, really want DISTURBING IDEAS? If my blog of contrasting and disturbing ideas is not enough, then I invite you to read what the saints have written through the ages, ideas that are extremely unprintable and widely unpopular, if not unacceptable.

The Catholic Church has always been plagued by scandalous scandals. Name a century and we have at least one great scandal. The latest of these is the issue of pedophile priests and the American Church's cover-up. But thanks to the Church's invaluable wealth - its canonized and yet-to-be-canonized saints - these sins are exposed especially after the writings of some would-be saint are uncovered right after or long after his/her death, like a Catholic version of the discovery of Anne Frank's diaries. In Tagalog, "Laging nabubuking ang lahat ng itinatagong baho!"

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I remember R.'s sister who used to keep some kind of spiritual journal which her father eventually discovered. R said their father irately told his sister this: "Why? Are you expecting to be some kind of saint someday?"

Let me take the opportunity of stating categorically that my writings have none of that girl's lofty intention. In case you're missing the point, I just want to serve and to entertain. And I don't deny the many errors I might be committing along the way.

Then again, what's wrong with that girl's keeping such a journal? Who knows, right? Look at the people who've been eventually canonized by the Vatican, many of them after decades, even centuries, of doubt and investigation.

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"I do not promise you that you would be happy in this life, but in the next." - Our Lady of Lourdes (the reported apparition of the Immaculate Conception) to a young girl, Bernadette Soubiros, at Rue de Bac. (This statement makes all thoughts of utopia useless, but it runs the danger of being interpreted as a call to apathy in the face of this world's misery.)

"One's life is beyond one's control, wherefore seeking to subject it to control is a false self-control, while acknowledging that it is beyond control is true self-possession." - Evangelium vitae (If I'm not mistaken, this - an echo of the above - is by Pope John Paul II.)

"Our Lord loves with a most tender love those who are fortunate enough to abandon themselves completely to his fatherly care, letting themselves be governed by his divine providence - without any idle speculation as to whether it will be useful to them and to their advantage or painful to them and to their loss." - St. Francis of Sales, Spiritual Conference. (Next to St. Francis of Assisi, this other Francis stumps the heck out of me.)

"I will spend my heaven doing good on earth." - St. Thérèse of Lisieux. (Long before Opus Dei founder Jose Maria Escriva declared the possibility of saintliness in the secular, there was the Little Flower Thérèse's "heaven-on-earth." A rather revolutionary thought, for how can a hopelessly imperfect world be heaven?)

"Dios solo basta." ("God alone suffices.") - Teresa of Avila (Name a woman gutsier than Teresa of Avila! Try to say this one if you find yourself unemployed, have nothing to eat, have no one to run to, etc.)

"Humility is the acknowledgement of what is true." - St. Teresa of Avila (Give me a better definition. This captures best the need for a detached SWOT analysis of oneself.)

"Holiness is doing God's will with a smile." - Mother Teresa (If brevity is literary, then Mother Teresa should be canonized. Alas, Gertrude Stein reportedly once declared that remarks, no matter how beautiful, are not literature.)

"It’s not the giving that counts but the amount of love in the giving." – Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa has that rare capacity to see through the Christian heart of the matter.)

"Each time anyone comes into contact with us, they must become different and better people because of having met us. We must radiate God's love." - Mother Teresa (What I love furthermore about Mother Teresa is, she is genuinely ecumenical. Whenever she refers to upholding the dignity of man, she refers to all men and women, and she means all - Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims. No one else before her in the Catholic world had done that. No wonder people of different faiths love her. Mother Teresa's brand of spirituality is, I say, the way forward for the Catholic church or any church for that matter.)

(More of this some other time.)

posted by Resty Odon  # 7:26 PM