How do you know what is God's will?
Yesterday I attended a talk at CSC about discerning God's will. Many times, especially when we are making major decisions in life, we want to know which decision is God's will and which is not. The session, done by Father William Goh, talks about discerning in a clear and systematic way.Basically, there are 3 criteria for deciding whether the decision is willed by God.
1. The decision should not lead you to abandon your current responsibilities. For example, if you suddenly feel that God is calling you to do mission work in Africa, yet you have elderly parents to take care of here in Singapore... then most probably, that is not God's will. Usually the decision will enhance your present vocation/duties and not cause you to abandon it. There are exceptions of course, but then you have to see if it fulfills the other 2 criteria.
2. The decision you make will result you in being a state of peace, joy or consolation. This state is enduring and not momentary. So if you decide on a decision and it leaves you excited at first but very unsettled later, maybe you should re-evaluate. On the other hand, the decision might be a difficult one and you might experience fear and anxiety at first, but if after a while you find an inner peace and joy despite the fear, it might actually be the right decision.
3. The decision that you make, results in virtues such as humility, charity, obedience perseverance. This means that the decision you make will result in more humility, charity, obedience and perseverance either being exhibited by yourself or the people around you. The most important virtue is charity or love - all the other virtues pale before love. If the decision results in love, then it has a higher chance of being God's will.
The talk goes on more about presuppositions of discernment, about some basic principles of discernment, for example, discernment is best done in a group (personal discernment is less effective than group). Also discernment should include the counsel of holy people and legitimate authorities (like your parish priest ;-) ) The decision that you are about to make must also be in line with church teachings, bible teachings even before we consider the 3 criteria.
Overall the talk was very enriching, enlightening and very useful for daily decision making. It was held at the Catholic Spirituality Centre.
// Dan
posted by rciy @ 11:47 PM
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Sunday, November 2, 2008
Love Without Hope. But Love Anyway.
Hi all,We just had our visit to Blue Cross, Pelangi Village today. It's a home that houses male residents that have varying degrees of mental disability.
The visit was challenging, as it forced us to step out of our comfort zone to reach out to them, but ultimately the whole experience was both humbling and rewarding.
Anyway I want to share something that I shared after the visit, for the benefit of those who couldn't make it. After the activities with the residents, we retreated to a corner where we had some reflections. Brother Alphonsus read a passage from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 (The famous chapter that you hear in a lot wedding masses, because it speaks about love ;-)) The last line of the chapter goes:
So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
This got me to think about love, hope and faith being seperate entities and how love was the greatest among these three. I was thinking about hope and love. Can we love without hope?
Looking at the residents, I realize that perhaps hope is not something that is in abundance among them. (I think) Very few of them actually get better and go out to integrate with society. Those that actually do are the lucky ones, most of them are quite old and will probably spend the rest of their days in the home. Hope for them to recover is something quite difficult to conceive.
Looking specifically at our visit that day, we just merely spent a few hours with them to talk to them, sing for them and to play some simple games. These can't hardly have much of an impact to them or to their mental health, what can a few hours do that will help them get better? The hope for them to get better just because our brief visit is quite pointless.
Yet we can still love without hope. We can still do things for them out of love, show our care and concern for them, bring some joy in their lives. Love is still real, strong and concrete without the presence of hope for them to get better. Our loving actions still touch them in some way and brings comfort to them. We love not for the sake of hope but love for love's sake.
It's something like stories you hear about someone caring for his spouse, even though the spouse can no longer recognize the care giver due to sickness or old age. Or how the destitute and dying are taken care of even though they have no hope of recovery. Love is shown onto them even when hope has long since walked out the door.
It is difficult, but it can be done, and it must be done because we all have been loved first by God.
Love without hope. but love anyway.
Just my thoughts.
// Dan
posted by rciy @ 10:23 PM
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Saturday, November 1, 2008
Struggling with our own Inadequacy.
A really beautiful reflection in the Catholic News:Struggling with our own Inadequacy, by Father Ron Rolheiser
It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments we admit this.
Rarely is there a day when we could not echo these words by Anna Blaman:
"I realized that it was simply impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure.
If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, it left another in the cold.
No day and no hour go by without my being guilty of inadequacy.
We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done, except being inadequate,
which we are good at because that is the way we are made.
This is true of me and of everyone else. Every day and every hour brings with it its weight of moral guilt, as regards my work and my relations with others.
I am constantly catching myself out in my human failings and, in spite of their being implied in my human imperfection, I am conscious of a sort of check.
And this means that my human shortcomings are also my human guilt.
It sounds strange that we should be guilty where we can do nothing about it.
But even where there is no set purpose, no deliberate intention, we have a conviction of our own shortcomings, and of consensual guilt, a guilt which shows itself all too clearly in the consequences of what we have done or left undone."
[+/-]Click here to read the rest of post...
Henri Nouwen occasionally expressed similar feelings: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals.
There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said.
There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit.
Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives.
When we are in touch with ourselves, we can relate to these words, these expressions of inadequacy. At the end of the day, we cannot measure up and cannot not disappoint others and ourselves. Generally the fault is not that we are not sincere or that we do not put out the effort. The fault is that we are human. We have limited resources, get tired, experience feelings we cannot control, have only 24 hours in our day, have too many demands on us, have wounds and weaknesses that shackle us, and thus know exactly what St. Paul meant when he said: Woe, to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing!
That may sound negative, neurotic, and stoic, and it can be those things, but, appropriated properly, it can generate hope and renewed energy in our lives.
To be human is to be inadequate, by definition. Only God is adequate and the rest of us can safely say to ourselves: Fear not you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this. Personally, I take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who, while waiting for the bridegroom, all fell asleep, wise and the foolish alike. Even the wise were too human and too weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy, can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it.
But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. A biblical scholar, Gerhard Lofink, puts it this way: The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ's return. They gathered in Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return.
I try to celebrate Eucharist every day. I do this because I am a priest and part of the covenant a priest makes with the church at his ordination is to pray the priestly prayer of Jesus, the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, regularly for the world. But I do it too, more personally, for another reason: The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don't always know whether I'm following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this, if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.
~crystal
posted by rciy @ 11:18 AM
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