A time of waiting

A new year, a new season, and the same wait. We are at the beginning of a new liturgical year. And curiously, the new year doesn't start with a feast, but rather with a period of waiting. The entire point of Christian life is about waiting, as Bishop Barron puts it. "We are an advent people. Israel was an advent people. The Church is an Advent Church." St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians famously said, "Love is patient." If God is love, and we are made to love him, then we have to be patient. And that's what Advent teaches us—to wait.

If you have trouble being patient, you're not alone. We live in a world where we don't have to be patient. Everything is just a click away. And sometimes we see our spiritual lives in the same light. We believe our prayers must be answered immediately or they are simply not effective. It wasn't a serious study, but one of my friends at Church once said, "I went back to see all the requests I made to God last year and he fulfilled about 95% of them." If we do the same exercise, we see that God fulfills most of our serious requests, so long as it is good for us and in line with his will for our lives. 

But what are we waiting for? In my previous posts, I talked a lot about the Cross and the Resurrection and surely Christianity wouldn't be a religion if Christ didn't die on the Cross and rise again on the third day. Christianity however isn't just a religion of the past. It isn't just a religion for the middle ages or for the 21st century, it is a religion of all ages, and especially of the end times. Christians have always believed that their Lord, Jesus, will come again in glory. We wait and hope for Christ to come again. 

If Christ has already come and comes to us everyday in prayer, then why are we hung up on his second coming. I don't wish to go into the theology or cite every verse from Saint Paul talking about Christ's return, but let me just say that Christ's second coming will be more wonderful than his first. The first coming did change the world quite a bit. In just four centuries, the most powerful empire of its time, Rome, would go from persecuting Christians to becoming Christian. 

The second coming will however be definite. It will be the day of our final judgement. Judgement sounds scary because we think of judgement with human eyes. We judge people and it feels horrible to be judged by others. But God is different. He doesn't judge us on what we have done but he judges with the metric of love. We have been created through love, we have been created for love and created to be loved. If we have lived a life of love, we have nothing to fear when Christ returns in glory. If we've failed to love, then we have to fear his return. 

All of us have failed to love as we should, and here again God's way of seeing us is very different to the way we see ourselves and see others. God is infinitely merciful. And in his mercy, he is willing to forgive all our sins in an instant. The only thing he is asking is for us to acknowledge our sinfulness and our desire to love. God, however, also knows that we all desire love and if we sometimes live as if we don't, it's because of our brokenness. That's why he sent his only Son Jesus to come and rescue us. 

In less than four weeks, we will be celebrating the feast of our Lord's Nativity. We will remember how God renewed the world through incarnation and hope for his second coming with great trust. When he come to Earth for the first time two thousand years ago, he showed great mercy to sinners. He lived and dined with tax collectors and prostitutes. He didn't discriminate between the Jew and the Greek, between man and woman, the clean and the leper, the saint and the sinner. He loved all of them. 

When he comes again, he will want to see if we have loved others in the same way he has loved us. It is impossible to love like Jesus all the time. But Jesus isn't asking for moral perfection, he is asking for our desire to love. If we are constantly striving to love more and be more like Jesus, we can be confident that his second coming will not be scary, and it will certainly be a moment of jubilation. 

It will be like Christmas night, but only much better. During the first coming, Christ came in the middle of night, hidden from the sight of the world. During his second coming, he will be visible to all humanity at once. If his purpose during the first coming was to save us from death and sin, his second coming has a much bigger purpose—to give us eternal life, once and for all. All we need to do is to wait. Waiting isn't something passive. It's active. We wait as the servants waited for their master's return in Christ's time. We prepare a sumptuous dinner and we stake awake, so that when Christ comes again, he is welcomed rather than put to death. 

So, during Advent, let us prepare ourselves for the great event of the future by growing in love. Everyday, let us ask ourselves, "have I loved today?" Let us also spend more time with the Holy Scriptures and grow also in faith and hope. Christ will come again. There is no question about that. We don't know when but we do know with certainty that he will. Love is patient. Let us love God and his people patiently until he comes again. He will not disappoint. 

The childlike joy of being born again

Four years ago, I was baptized and became a Christian. It was a wonderful moment and I realize how important sacraments are each time I think about my baptism. If you have been baptized in any church, then the good news is that God has cleansed you of your sins, given you new clothes to wear and extended an invitation to heaven. If you haven’t received baptism yet, it’s never too late to think about it. I was baptized at the age of 23. Today’s blog post is about the deep connection between divine mercy and baptism. If my Good Friday post was solemn because it was melancholic, today’s post is joyous because it’s real.

I still remember meeting the Anglican bishop who baptized me, the evening before the big day. My heart was throbbing. I was so excited that day and so scared. I told the bishop about my journey to the Christian faith and he asked me if I ever prayed. I said I prayed the rosary and liked the Eucharistic rites. He then asked me if knew about silent prayer. It is very fitting that until my baptism I should have never known about silent prayer. I wasn’t raised a Christian so prayer to me was all about pleading to God for mercy. I thought prayer was a reflection of modern society – the one who shouts the loudest gets heard and the one who keeps silent is left behind. In God’s kingdom, the opposite is true. The one who shouts drowns God’s tender voice and the one who keep silent receives many favours. It is not we who are seeking God's mercy but God who is seeking to pour out graces of his infinite mercy on us. 

He gave me a book on silent prayer. The next day, I put on a white shirt and a black pant. I was ready to be baptized. We always are. Although we are never fully ready to receive God’s grace in this life and we will only enter heaven after death and purging, we are always ready for baptism. This is because, we are sinners and God is merciful. The only logical thing to do then is to ask for God’s mercy and be cleansed of sins. St. Therese used to say, God is terrible at arithmetic, he cannot count our sins. She’s right. And this is especially true of baptism. That Sunday morning in Paris’s 16^th arrondissement, God washed off my sins, all of them, each one of them. 

Misery without mercy begets despair, mercy without misery begets presumption, said the great French thinker Pascal. The wonderful thing about Easter is that Easter always follows Good Friday and Good Friday is always followed by Easter. The Cross and the Resurrection are only a few days apart. Yes, our sins do cause great pain and did indeed break the merciful heart of Jesus and crucify him to death. But God’s mercy is greater than all our sins, weaknesses and failures. Baptism doesn’t give us the freedom to sin, it gives us freedom from sin. By Christ’s death, we are given a second chance. We don't undo our first birth, but we are born again, giving meaning and value to our first birth. 

Barabbas, the thief in the passion narrative, is a beneficiary of divine mercy in an extraordinary way. A bandit, he is let free in place of Jesus. In a very real sense, Jesus is crucified because of Barabbas. But it’s equally true to say that Barabbas has been freed by Jesus’s dying. Christ made himself a willing victim to save us from the punishment for our sins.

Tomorrow is Divine Mercy Sunday. This year, it falls just two days after the anniversary of my baptism. It’s a great coincidence. Most Catholics will unfortunately not be able to go to mass tomorrow. But God’s mercy is always present for all those seek him. The Church tells us that is desire for baptism is sufficient for the remission of our sins and to be counted among God’s faithful. It also teaches us that if we are truly repentant for our sins, God doesn’t look at our situation but at our thoughts and intentions.

“O Jesus, I know it, love is repaid by love alone, and so I searched and I found the way to solace my heart by giving you Love for Love.” – St Therese of Lisieux

God wants us to love him and he wants to love him like a child. St. Therese understood that there is only way to find happiness in this life, it is by giving love for love. The only reason the cross makes sense is because God loves us. It is God’s love that is so powerful to wash away our sins. We cannot go back and change our lives but thanks to God’s great mercy, we are able to be born again through the sacrament of baptism. There is great childlike joy in being born again. I still remember very vividly that beautiful day when I received God’s grace in a very concrete manner.

It is said that the graces of Divine Mercy Sunday are similar to Baptism. Let us not despair because of our sins, our failures or our imperfections. Baptism washes away our sins and Divine Mercy Sunday is another reminder of God’s willingness to restore us to our original innocence.  

My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?

The solemness of the day cannot be overstated. For it was on this day, that God offers us the greatest possible gift of his mercy. By offering up his only Son on the Cross for the salvation, God accomplishes what he started at the beginning of time. No wonder, Jesus, the humble son of the living God, dies with these words on his lips, "It is finished." No Christ isn't talking about the end of the world, but the beginning of its creation. He has finished the work his Father started.

Nearly 2,000 years after Christ's fulfillment of his Father's mission, I entered St. George's Anglican Church in Paris for the very first time. It was a Sunday, a day of rest and day of celebration. It was on this day that Christians believe Jesus rose again from the dead. We were in the middle of summer so the church was relatively empty. The service was rather simple and straightforward. I didn't understand any of it and just followed what others were doing. A gentleman next to me showed me the texts and hymns to sing along and I just did what he told me to do. 

I didn't receive any special revelation on that day. I went home as usual. But God had struck a chord with me. From that Sunday onward, I cherish this holy day every week, primarily because it is a day of rest. But it is also a day of hope and joy, because no matter how bad the week was, Sunday always offers hope that after death, there is the resurrection.

In the next few weeks, I'd live my own version of our Lord's Passion and Resurrection, one that'd drive me to despair and had it not been for God's amazing grace, to suicide. I had no success when it came to my internship search, I didn't manage to find a new apartment for the upcoming year and to make things worse, I was a victim of a scam that wiped my bank account savings. I also lost my wallet (which thank God, I managed to find it back later). The scam and losing the wallet happened on the same day. I couldn't take it anymore. I rushed to kitchen to find something to kill myself and end all this suffering, once and for all. 

I was inconsolable. I asked the question Jesus asked on the cross but without knowing it. "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?" (I hadn't read that part of the Gospel yet). Somehow I found the courage in the midst of all of this. I had an appointment scheduled with an Anglican priest the next day and I said to myself, I will ask him the question every skeptic asks, "Where is God in all of this?" 

I'm sure you are curious to know what happened next. The very next day, I found my wallet, so I was slightly more hopeful than the day before. It was a Thursday. On Friday, I found an internship at the OECD. By Sunday, I had found an apartment, and one that I would share with 8 other Catholics and where I would take baby steps towards holiness. 

Three days before, I was at the worst point of my life. I had felt as if I was totally useless, unable to rent an apartment, to manage money, to find a job. In short, useless at everything and a burden to my parents and to society. Three days later, I could repeat after St. Thomas, "My Lord and my God." I believed in the resurrection on that Sunday. And I have never doubted it since. In a very personal way, God gave me the grace to partake in his passion and his rising. 

When I repeat this story to my Christian friends, they were amazed at God's bounty. However, when I said the same thing to my parents or to non-believers, their response is always, "Oh, you must be exaggerating". Only God knows, how, when I had been robbed and when I realized I was naked like Adam after the original sin, vulnerable to the core, how much I desired death. 

Had it not been for God's grace, I would have never made it out. But I recall not only the pain and the suffering but also the joy when it all ended and when I found joy again. I recall these events often because they remind me of God's unceasing love for us. He never abandons me. When I cry out, "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me," he always comes to my aid. 

"You alone are true joy, my hope and my crown, my gladness and my honor, my Lord!" - St.  Therese of Lisieux

I will also share why after this episode, I began to develop a great devotion to St. Therese, who became my elder sister in faith. I fell in love with her and I truly consider to be friend. As, we Catholics believe that Saints are very much alive, I believe she watches over me, reveals her secrets and listens to me, when I talk to her.

I was attracted to Therese because even though it seemed that she had a pretty normal life she did go through the same emotions of extreme sadness as I did. But she also demonstrated immense strength and courage in the face of trials, and most importantly, great confidence in God's love. 

She showed me that it is precisely when we are vulnerable to the core that God enters our hearts and make our heart is dwelling place. We can then sing with Therese the mercies of our Lord. You alone are true joy, my hope and my crown, my gladness and my honor, my Lord!"

Jesus enters my boat

One of my favorite scenes from the Gospel is when Jesus Christ enters the boat of Simon Peter without asking his permission. Little did Peter know when he went out fishing that day, that he'd be called by God himself to be the rock on which he built his church - a pastor for all his people, for all of time. And that popes, centuries later, would be called successors of Saint Peter.

I don't know where God is calling me and if one day I will become a saint, but it is true that God did enter my life rather abruptly. I wasn't necessarily searching for God but when I think about it, it does seem as if he was searching for me all my life and when the right moment came, he did all he could to reveal himself to me.

It was the summer of 2015, I was still a student living in Paris's 9th arrondissement. The university term had ended. I had gone back home for month or two and was now back in Paris to find an internship for the coming semester. I was alone, I had time on my hands and my situation was somewhat precarious. Three things that greatly facilitated God's desire to find me. 

Up until that point, I was the last person you could call religious or spiritual. I couldn't stand when people talked about God. And as introvert, the idea of belonging to any church was scary. My own experiences with Hinduism were terrible. My parents are decent people but I felt the only reason why anybody was a Hindu in my family was out of habit. I was inducted into Hinduism, apart from being born into the family, when I was about 13. I never received any proper catechism. I will stop there because my knowledge of Hinduism stops there. I don't enough about it to critique or praise it or to find parallels with Christianity. We rarely ever spoke about religion at home even though it seems God was everywhere with statues and images.

Back to Paris, summer of 2015, the idle months of July and August. I was bored in the very existential sense of that word. My attempts at finding an internship were failing and I was soon going to be evicted of my Paris apartment. Out of curiosity I started researching Christianity online. I didn't know one bit about Christian theology or any of the arguments put forth but I was curious about this religion I knew so little about. I read CS Lewis's Mere Christianity and listened to a few evangelical preachers online. 

I wasn't convinced by the arguments but I grew more and more curious about this new religion that I had discovered. I decided to go to an Anglican Church and talk to the priest. I chose the Anglicans because I felt they were the more levelheaded of all Christian denominations and because I knew so little about the theological differences, I decided Anglican Church was the right one for me. At the very least, I could speak to the priest in English—which was a rare privilege in France. 

I was still in the very early stages of my faith journey and I had more questions than answers but Jesus had definitely entered my boat. Like the disciples I didn't understand most of Jesus's teaching but he had kindled my curiosity and in the summer of 2015, he was occupying more and more of my thoughts. 

My life was going to change radically. In just a few months after first researching Christianity online, my life would have changed completely. In my next post, I will talk about how God transformed my life in a matter of months and how I went from being curious about Christianity to becoming a Christian. 

In today's reflection, St. Therese says, "For the sake of Jesus we took His cross, and for His sake let us persevere in it."

This seems to be very different from my story. I didn't take up Jesus's cross, at least not at the beginning of my faith journey. But it does ask to us persevere. And I believe God himself gives us the force to persevere in the quest to find him. It would have been very easy for me to be curious about Christianity one day and move on to another interesting topic the very next day. But once God enters our boat, he gives us the force to persevere even when things go badly. 

In the next post, I will go into greater detail but little did I realize, that making the choice to follow Jesus meant giving up a lot. And yet, in retrospect, I am amazed how I was able to persevere in the midst of so much trouble, not to mention so much doubt and darkness. It was surely because of God's grace.

The lesson I learnt from this very first episode in my Christian faith journey is this—it is God who makes the first steps to come to us. Today is Palm Sunday and we can reflect on God's great sacrifice 2,000 years ago. I wouldn't be alive today if not for that sacrifice. Faith is not so much about pleasing God as it is about responding to God's love. Saying "Yes" to God is scary and is full of struggles but it is easy when God gives us the force and the strength to do it. 

What do we Christians mean when we say God loves us?

You might have often heard Christians say, God loves us. To be honest, I used to find this adage rather sentimental and somewhat irrational. In any case, how does it matter if God loves us or not and what does it mean to love anyway? The best definition of love that I have ever heard is one from Bishop Robert Barron. Love, the bishop says, "willing the good of the other as other." All of us love but all of us love conditionally. That is to say, we love ourselves when we love somebody else. But God loves us even if we don't love him. He loves us when we make mistakes and he loves us when we're suffering and when we're happy. 

Even the most unconditional human love you can think of, such as a parent's love for his newborn still contains, at least to some extent, self-love. If you wanted to see what true love looks like, you need to look at the Cross on which our savior Jesus died. This is a great meditation for today; we're Friday in Passion Week, exactly one week before Good Friday. It is precisely this love that "converted" me. On the Cross, God tells us he has nothing to gain by loving us. His love is totally selfless. One priest once told me, to fully understand God's love for us, it is important to realize that God created the world out of love and out of love, his Son Jesus (more on Jesus and Trinity later), died a rather sad death on the cross, something he could have avoided if he wanted to. It is a love that makes no sense. It's an irrational love that gives us the strength to love when it makes no sense whatsoever to love. 

What would become of me if God did not give me courage?

This is the question Therese asks in today's daily reflection and it is a question I ask often. If not for the great example of love that Jesus showed me on the Cross, would have I had the courage to follow him? What I have had the courage to love others? Because, to love others, requires immense courage. We have to be prepared to be disappointed. When we love, we are vulnerable, others can mock our love, criticize us and pay our love back with vengeance and hatred. 

God gave me courage and he gave me courage through his Cross. I don't like to talk about my depression often but it was a sad and painful event in my life. I had graduated from university but had not yet clinched that all-important first job. I had serious confidence issues and was struggling with my new faith. How to reconcile this new faith with the faith that my family had passed on to me? On the one hand, God's love is manifest powerfully in Christ and on the other hand, this love for Christ asks us to make difficult choices. If God didn't give me courage, I would have never made it.

It is in those trying months in 2016, when I was at the rock bottom of my life, that I understood what Jesus went through during his passion. Unlike my own story where things eventually got better, Christ suffered this anguish right up until his death. If it wasn't for his example, wouldn't I have given up fighting altogether?

And so, by dying such a painful death, Jesus identifies with us when we are the worst point in our lives. When we feel alone, unloved and weak, we can look up to somebody who had it worse. It would be wrong however to see Christianity as a crutch when things are difficult in life. If that were the case, it'd be way too easy to forget Jesus when things start to get better. After all, who needs God when everything is well? Do we not turn to God precisely when we have exhausted all other options?

The Cross gives us another lesson, something that saints throughout history have understood beautifully. The Cross is not just about us but about imitating Jesus. We are called to imitate Jesus's love and his humility in the Cross. God's love is folly and our love should also imitate this folly. Jesus being fully God had no need for this suffering. If he did suffer, it was out of love for us. We all suffer from time to time, but isn't it best to suffer like God, to suffer for love?

Depression in my case was accentuated by the fact that I was so focused on my own life and my own struggles that I failed to see the struggles of other people around me. I was so focused on my own little world that I failed to appreciate the beauty of the world outside. 

In the upcoming posts, I will tell you how the Cross liberated me and offered me a new perspective on life. But before I finish, let me just say one thing about God's love. Yesterday, I talked about God's mercy, today let me show what it means in a very concrete way. Concretely, God's mercy means that no matter where we are in life right now, God is with us. As the Psalms tell us, even if we were to descend to the depths of godforsakenness, God is still there with us. And the Cross is a perfect example of this unending mercy. Even as Jesus was dying on the cross, he was forgiving our sins and offering us a second chance.

God loved me when I didn't know him. He loves me now and he will always love me. How can I be sure of this? And how I can have the courage to talk about his love in a public forum if Jesus didn't suffer his passion? It is his passion that gives us the strength to love and to talk about love. When I say, God loves me, I mean God loves me at all times even when I do not perceive it. 

Have a blessed Friday and remember you are loved by a God who is extremely good and who loves you no matter who you are and how bad your life is. May his love give us courage this day and give us courage for the rest of our lives. 

Proclaiming God's endless mercy

In less than ten days, we will celebrate the greatest feast of the year, Easter. It is a wonderful feast that captivates me every time I think about it. I feel there can be no single day that more perfectly announces the life that is to come than Easter Sunday. This year, Easter will be a bit different for most people. God, in his everlasting mercy, has given me the wonderful opportunity to live in a church and to have access the sacraments of grace in these perilous times. Even more than food and water, we are in need of God’s mercy. And although sacraments have been temporarily suspended around the world, and for good reason, since saving human lives is so essential to the Christian ethos, God’s mercy is ever present. He knows the hearts of each one of us and he wishes to forgive each one of us, no matter what our sin.

That said, I feel strongly that God is calling me to talk about his mercy to all those who are willing to listen. Each day, as long as this lockdown lasts, and hopefully even after that, I will talk about my conversion to the Catholic faith and how I have come to fully understand God’s love and mercy and how this merciful love of God is the fodder for my soul and to put it bluntly, the only reason I’m still alive.

Many of my friends are not Catholic and many do not believe in personal God. In God’s great providence, he has given me many friends and family who grew up with a completely different theological and philosophical worldview. I no longer see this is as an impediment. I feel instead that God is using me to be an apostle to those who would never know or hear about the goodness of Jesus Christ.

If I have to summarize all of the Christian faith in three words, it is that God is Good. And if I could add a few more words, I’d say, and his mercy is forever. Whether you’re Christian or not, and no matter what preconception you have of the Catholic Church, be rest assured that priests around the world are praying and offering up their sacrifices for you, so that you may have everlasting joy.

As a new convert, my enthusiasm for my new found faith in Jesus Christ is perhaps excessive. But if it is so, it is no doubt because God’s mercy is also equally excessive. Each day I will post a quote from the Society of the Little Flower website, from my favourite saint.

Today, on an exceptional basis, I will post two quotes from St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, a Canonized Saint and Doctor of the Holy Catholic Church. These are once again taken from the Daily Reflections section of the Society of the Little Flower website and I give them all the credit for the incredible work they are doing in promoting devotion to a saint who knew quite a lot about God’s infinite mercy.

“For me, God's infinite mercy is the quality that stands out in my life, and when I contemplate and adore God's other perfections, it's against this background of mercy all the time.” – St. Therese of Lisieux

“I do not regret having offered myself up as a victim to Love.” – St. Therese of Lisieux

Although these two quotes look quite different, they say the same thing. God’s mercy is infinite and this is what makes God Love. Christianity makes a bold claim that Love is not an attribute of God but God is himself love. And because he is love, Therese can make an equally strong statement. There is no regret in offering oneself to Love. I can confirm. I have never regretted my decision to follow Jesus even though it has cost me so much and strained my relationship with my family.

This is because love demands sacrifice and God’s infinite love demands we fully offer ourselves up to him. If all these seems too abstract do not worry. In the days and weeks to come, I will publish God’s good works in my life and hopefully you’ll be able to see more clearly what it means to worship a God who loves us and forgives us indiscriminately.

Source: please note that the quotes are taken from the Society of the Little Flower website. https://www.littleflower.org/prayers-sharing/daily-reflections/