Mercy in the the face of Misery

Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. (...) Mercy has become living and visible in Jesus of Nazareth, reaching its culmination in him. Misericordiae Vultus

Throughout the Old Testament, God revealed himself as being ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,’ (Exo. 34:6-7). God now reveals his true face in Jesus of Nazareth who incarnated the mercy of God throughout his mortal life, and this was shown in countless episodes of his public life.

Compassion for the crowds
‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (…) When he went ashore, Jesus saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. (…) I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way.’ (Matt. 9:36, 14:14, 15:32)

The Greek word ‘splagchnizomai’ used here to mean ‘to have compassion’ has the deepest meaning when it refers to mercy, commiseration or having pity for someone. It comes from ‘splanxna’, which means ‘the inward parts’, and describes the degree of compassion that moves and shakes a person to the depth of his being. Having goose bumps would probably be the closest physical manifestation of this feeling. Apart from its use in certain parables, it is only used in the gospels in the episodes that we will study here: Matthew 9:36, 14:14, 20:34, Mark 1:41 and Luke 7:13.

The bread of the soul – Jesus feels compassion for the crowd, for people in general, because they walk aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd. Pope Paul VI used to say that the hunger of the spirit is much worse than the hunger of the body. An undernourished spirit can never be independent because it cannot direct itself, thus never achieving self-fulfillment and happiness. Before the errant crowds who had not found the meaning of life, Jesus taught and showed them the way, the truth and the life, and presented himself as the model they needed to follow.

‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way…’ (Isa. 53:6). Jesus gave us the reasons to live, as individual persons and as a people of a flock which he shepherds.

Health – Filled with compassion for human sufferings caused by various diseases, Jesus healed the sick; afflicted by the misery of others, he could not bear to see anyone suffer and so he would promptly put an end to these sufferings.

The Latin word ‘salutem’ meaning salvation is derived from the word ‘salus’ meaning health. They can be used interchangeably as in “una salus victis nullam sperare salutem” meaning “the only salvation for those who have been defeated is not to wait for salvation”, from the poem ‘The Aeneid’ by Virgil. Therefore instead of saying that Jesus is our salvation, we could very well say that Jesus is our health.

As a matter of fact, Jesus spent a great part of his earthly life as a physician, healing many from all kinds of illnesses because without health there is no life. Jesus brought health to our body, health to our psyche, health to our soul and spirit, health to our moral conscience and past life, or in other words, health to our entire being.

The bread of the body – Because of their spiritual hunger, the people were starved for the Lord’s words, for he spoke with authority, therefore they stayed with him for three days but at the end they became bodily hungry. Because of this, Jesus would not dismiss them without first giving them something to eat so to restore their strength for the journey home. The apostles however were thinking of sending them home to look for their own food, but Jesus insisted that the apostles provide it for them…

Primum vivere deinde philosophari – Jesus knew all too well the Maslow’s theory of hierarchy of needs for human motivation which states that it is only after the basic needs are met that one feels the need to meet the spiritual ones. This being said, Jesus was concerned not just with some aspects of human life, as the disciples would have preferred, but with all its aspects. This is why he could not let the crowd go without first giving them something to eat… Bread for our mouths, and the satisfaction of our material needs are what we also ask for in the ‘Our Father’ prayer that he taught us.

Compassion for the marginalized
‘As they were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed him. There were two blind men sitting by the roadside. When they heard that Jesus was passing by, they shouted, ‘Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!’ (..) Jesus stood still and called them, saying, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, let our eyes be opened.’ Moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes. Immediately they regained their sight and followed him.’ (Matt. 20:29-34)

Jericho, the oldest city in the world, was built 9,000 years before Christ. In the Bible, it is the symbol of sin. The parable of the Good Samaritan tells us of a man who fell into the hands of thieves on his descent from Jerusalem to Jericho, meaning falling from grace to sin. Jesus wants to save humanity from sin, which is why he went to Jericho, incarnated as a member of the sinful human race. The Gospel tells us that Jesus had already left the city accompanied by those in the crowd who had experienced salvation and were now following him as disciples.

On the fringe of this path that led to salvation, there were two blind men who could not walk along the road because they could not see. They heard others speak of the one who is the way, the truth and the life, and they did not want to miss this unique opportunity to encounter him themselves. as there indeed opportunities that appear only once in life. So in spite of the objections coming from the crowd, who told them to be silent, they cried out even louder clinging to the only lifeline which was the Lord.

 Jesus asks them what they want because they may not have wanted to change their lives and may only have wanted a few coins to prolong the life of dependency which they led without having to work; in life many in fact prefer that they are given fish and not a fishing rod to fish. Therefore Jesus respectfully inquires first and only after hearing their response that they do want to change their life and to abandon Jericho i.e. sin, that he is overwhelmed with compassion and heals them.

In the Gospel according to Mark (10:46-52), the blind man is alone and must have been well-known for he had a name, Bartimaeus; he is encouraged by those who initially wanted him to be quiet when Jesus calls him.  He is so eager for salvation that he springs up to go to Jesus, throwing off the cloak that covered him and connected him to a life of dependency that he wants to leave behind.

Compassion for the excluded
‘A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ ‘(Mk. 1:40-41)

In those days and to a large extent even today, as I have seen in Ethiopia, there is no disease more terrible than leprosy; it disfigures the face and kills the person socially long before it does so individually. The lepers still today are forced to leave their families and to live in a secluded village for lepers only.

During the time of Jesus, they lived hidden and had to cry out ‘unclean’ if anyone inadvertently approached them in places where they lived. The leper is seen as a living dead, and a dead living. When Jesus sent his disciples on the Mission, he told them to cure the sick and cleanse the lepers, (Matt. 10:8).

The leper in the passage above broke the Law of Moses by approaching Jesus; however instead of sending him away, Jesus responds to his cry of despair with understanding and compassion. Jesus too broke the Law when he touched the leper; for him the leper was not unclean, but rather a desperate soul crying out for help.

Compassion and projection
‘(…) A man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; (…) When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.’ (Lk. 7:12-15)

He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow – By revealing the identity of the deceased, St. Luke uses the least number of words to describe the most painful situation, the most excruciating pain that a human being has to bear. The norm in life is that parents die before their children and not the children before their parents; it is almost against the law of nature that a mother should bury her son. “I will not bury my son, it is my son who will bury me” were the words that a desperate father once said after hijacking the operating room of a hospital, forcing the doctors to do surgery on his son while pointing a gun at them because he did not have the money to pay for the operation.

To make matters even worse, as the Gospel tells us, this woman was already a widow. Her only son was also her only hope of life because women in those days could not own any properties. Jesus saw the situation and even from afar was filled with compassion so that, when approaching her, it was he who took the initiative to address her because he wanted to console and dry her tears without delay.

I believe that Jesus projected on the widow of Nain all the pain that his own mother, Mary, would feel when she herself also being a widow would have to bury him, her only son. Therefore Jesus did for the widow of Nain what he would not be able to do for his own mother. He could dry the tears of the widow of Nain, but he could not dry the tears of his own mother. There is no image more heartbreaking than the Pietà by Michelangelo, the whole antithesis of Christmas, which depicts the adult Jesus dead on the lap of his mother.

Mercy in the face of Misery
‘The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ (…) ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ (…) When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’ ‘(Jn. 8:3-11)

The Jews wanted to put the merciful attitude of Jesus towards sinners in contradiction with the Mosaic Law presented in the Book of Leviticus (20:10), which commanded that such woman be stoned to death. This attitude of Jesus is all the more commendable if we note that after two thousand years such thing still happens in Muslim countries governed by Sharia law.

This is not the first time that Jesus is placed before a dilemma. If he does not condemn her he is transgressing the law; if he condemns her he contradicts his own merciful attitude towards sinners. Like in all other situations, Jesus does not comply with the terms of the dispute; with his silence he invites the accusers and also the woman to do an examination of conscience.  Before the insistence of the accusers, Jesus questions their authority as judges. According to St. Augustine, Jesus while writing in the sand with his finger was recalling that God wrote on the tablets of the Ten Commandments also with His finger, thus affirming that he is now the true judge, the one who is more powerful than Moses. In so doing, Jesus neither disrespected the law nor did he contradict his mercy.

Our human tendency is to throw away the baby with the bathwater as we are not able to distinguish between the sin and the sinner. Just like the Pharisees, we also tend to condemn more the sinner than the sin, but the fact is that we too are not exempted from judgment; it is hypocrisy when sinners judge sinners. In this, like in the other episodes, Jesus condemns the sin without condemning the sinner.

This woman was used first as an instrument of pleasure by the one who committed adultery with her then as an object of delight for all those who contemplated her nakedness and rejoiced in her shame. In their attempt to stone her, the Pharisees wanted to use her as a scapegoat for their own sins; people in general wanted to use her as an object for the type of sadistic pleasure that involves all the popular and cruel spectacles of lynching.

Humiliated to see her sin exposed and shamed in front of the crowd, the woman was disgraced for losing her reputation and was thrown to the ground by the weight of the torture that awaited her. It is likely that in the face of so much misery that she herself was probably wishing for death.

After exposing the hypocrisy of those who had exposed her, and after all had acknowledged that they were not innocent either, only two persons remained. As St. Augustine observed, ‘relicti sunt duo miseria et misericordia’ meaning ‘there were left the two, misery and mercy’. In order not to vex her further, without looking at her but with a gentleness, empathy and mercy beyond telling, Jesus addresses her as a person and speaks to her with an immeasurable tenderness, giving her back both her life and her dignity: ‘‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’’

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Love and Eternity

Look how beautiful you are, being at your side, truly I feel closer to God… Antonio Machín

Time and space
Time is a continuum, a non-spatial happening, in which events occur apparently irreversibly from the past, through the present, into the direction of the future. Space is a three-dimensional reality in which the whole of matter exists.

As spatial-temporal being, Man occupies a given space, for a given time. He is, therefore, a limited being because he is confined to a finite space and time because the occupancy of this space has its days numbered. Love however, undoing the limitations of time and space, makes man eternal.

Love
It is not easy to define “love”. It is a word that has been so over used and abused that it now has many meanings, some of them varying even from person to person. Fleeing from this complexity and confusion, which the tangle of different concepts and realities covered by the same word can generate in our heads, we could reduce the concept of love into two terms: more ethical, goodwill, and other less ethical or more natural, desire or attraction that one feels for the beloved.

Love as goodwill
St. Thomas Aquinas defined love as wanting the good of the other. Agape in Greek, translated as Caritas in Latin, is love that decentralizes from oneself and makes the other person the object and reason for our existence. This is the type of love that allowed St. Francis of Assisi to kiss a leper, towards whom he initially felt repulsion, and which allowed Christ and his followers to love their enemies.

Love as a desire and attraction
Uniting these two concepts of “Eros” and “Filia”, love is an intense feeling of desire and attraction, for a person with whom one seeks to unite spiritually, emotionally and sexually, in an intimate and romantic relationship.

It is true that these two meanings of love can, and even must, combine into one only. However to make things simpler in this reflection, let us put aside the first definition given since most people understand, the more commonly spoken love outside the religious context, the romantic love and not the love of goodwill.

To love is to experience eternity in the here and now of our existence
I was lifelong collector of moments of eternity, Arthur Rubinstein.

For the lovers, or those in love, every moment of staying together seems short, and they only become aware of “fugit tempus” after many hours have passed without them noticing. During these hours, when love made them forget both time and space, they experienced eternity. When you and the person you love are together, space occupied with her thins out and time stops because you lose awareness of both, only you and the beloved exist.

Only love pulverizes, makes disappear and annuls time and space; therefore eternity does not exist only in eternity, but it may already be experienced here by someone in love as proof of its existence. Human being is drawn to eternity and accesses it through love here and now in a simulated way, in addition to through space and time in a real way.

When the lovers are together they lose the notion of time and space and virtually experience eternity thus proving that it exists. Only love can lead us to real eternity because God is love. As suggested by Arthur Rubinstein, the more moments of eternity we collect, the more eternal we become.

Quality time
The time dedicated exclusively to nurturing a person, or loved ones, as well as a free time activity, a hobby. For example, a dad decides not to go to the bar at night in order to spend quality time with his wife and children; a boyfriend decides to put aside his books to spend quality time with his girlfriend.

Time is money and the time allocated to acquiring money is not as healthy as time dedicated to love; time thus spent does not make us lose the notion of time and space like love does which proves that money is not an eternal good but a temporal one; similarly, it does not satisfy us because our hearts are made to love people and not material things. Unlike human beings, time for animals is all spent canvassing for what they need to survive; mortals will we be, as they are, if we imitate them in the use of our time.

Eternity -- Love – God – are concepts that are self-explanatory. The above mentioned singer, Anthony Machin, felt closer to God in the company and in the contemplation of the beauty of his loved one. God is eternal, He exists outside of time and space which He himself created. 1 John 4:8 says that he who loves not has not come to know God, because God is love.

Whoever does not love does not know God and does not have access to eternity, because eternity is God and God is love; and if God is love then the only way to know Him is by loving. Love is the gateway to heaven and makes this earth Heaven for those who love. Since love leads to eternity, this same eternity is experienced in the here and now by the one who loves.  It is through love that we are drawn and called “to be like God”, that is, when we love, we partake of His essence and we are like Him.

Love is stronger than death
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a divine flame. Song of Solomon 8:6

If love exists then God exists because He is love; it God exists then eternity exists, and if eternity exists then love is eternal, and if love is eternal it is not as strong as death, as the beloved in the passage says, but rather it is stronger than death. The Portuguese poet, Camões, says that love is the fire that burns without being seen… The beloved in the Song says that such flames are divine and therefore eternal.

Ars lunga vita brevis, love is an art and as such it is eternal; life although brief, when it is spent to cultivate love it becomes eternal, because it is only love that crosses the threshold of death and directs it to eternity.

Camões comes to this same conclusion on recounting the biblical love that Jacob has for Rachel in one of his sonnets. Because of this love for her he was forced to serve his uncle Laban as a shepherd for seven years; after which his uncle instead of giving him Rachel he gave him Lea, the older sister, instead with the excuse that he could not marry the younger sister without first marrying the older one.

The sonnet closes with the words of Jacob who to prepare himself psychologically to serve his uncle another seven years to have Rachel exclaims: “More I will serve, if I do not, so long love so short life”. Love is in fact eternal, it cannot be fully made known in time, hence it leads us to eternity to carry out its fullness; love gives us eternity when we devote our transience to it, the time of our life.

It is also for this reason, as Jesus did, that it is possible to die from love and for love, because he who dies for love never dies because love is eternal. He who for love gives his life, never loses it; on the contrary, as Jesus assures us, it is he who wants to save his life who will lose it. (Lk. 9:24)

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The refugee boy who didnt drown

... he loves the stranger and gives him bread and clothing. Thou shalt love the stranger, for thou wast a stranger in the land of Egypt. Deuteronomy 10:18-19

The Refugee Crisis
In order to properly assess the refugee crisis, like any other issue, and to avoid the reductionist views to which prejudice and xenophobia lead, there is no way to frame the issue in a broader spatio-temporal context. A historical look of greater geographical breadth tells us that since the human race was born in Africa, in the Rift Valley 5 million years ago, it has never stopped moving.

From there it populated all the continents, and it was in the interaction with the different habitats that peoples with physiological, cultural and linguistic differences emerged. These characteristics were demarcated into three human groups, not races because we all came from a common stock: Negroid, Caucasian and.

Development does not always mean human progress. Nationalisms, and the consolidation of borders between nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made the natural displacement and mixing of peoples more difficult, increasing racism and xenophobia. In the ancient world, peoples moved with relative ease, there were no well-defined boundaries or guarding of them. That is why we can say that there are no races, no pure races, all the people are made up of other peoples.

We tend to mark differences between the Portuguese people and other peoples, and yet we too are a people made up of various ethnic groups, of other peoples: Iberians, Celts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Jews, Alans, Suevi, Vandals, Visigoths and Moors.

Situation in Syria
Ruled since the 1960s by the Al-Assad family, Syria belongs to the group of Muslim countries that have resisted Sharia rule. The current President Bashar Al-Assad was neither overthrown by America, like Saldam Hussein, nor by the Arab Spring and America like Gaddafi.

But by abusing force against the Arab Spring to stay in power, it has created a complex civil war between different ethnicities and religious groups that are fighting, not only against the dictator, but also among themselves, in coalitions that change every day. Taking advantage of this confusion is the Islamic State, in uncontrolled areas of Iraq and Syria. This time, Syrians found themselves trapped between the regime, rebel groups and the religious extremism of the Islamic State.

It's not hard to understand why they flee their country. The regime of Bashar al-Assad mercilessly kills civilians with chemical weapons and drum bombs; The so-called Islamic State commits all kinds of atrocities as we know, murders all who are not with them, tortures, crucifies, rapes and subjects women and girls to sexual slavery; other groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra do the same.  

Syrians flee back and forth within their own country; in fact, one third of Syria's population is now a refugee in their own country; another 4 million have left the country, of which 95% live in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan. The richest states of the Persian Gulf did not accept any refugees, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Baharain, Kuwait, Iran.

The world was not prepared for a refugee crisis on this scale, so many of the camps do not have sufficient resources so these populations are subject to hunger, cold and disease. Losing hope, some have decided to seek asylum in Europe, after a journey by land and sea exploited by traffickers, they arrive on the shores of a Europe that turns its back on them and erects walls to prevent them from entering. They have been debating how to divide them among themselves for months and have not yet reached an agreement.

Conspiracy theories, prejudices, clichés, xenophobia and Islamophobia
Opinions for all tastes are circulating on social networks; Generally negative, full of cliché prejudices and racism. For the most part, these opinions say nothing about the subject; They shed more light on the personality of those who create them and sustain them than on the subject of refugees. I collected some of them to exhibit them.

It is true that the richer Arab countries, those of the Persian Golf, have not helped them, but as stated above, the overwhelming majority of refugees live in the Arab countries neighboring Syria.

On the other hand, the Middle East is not a stable area where everyone wants to live; If they are Shiites they fear Sunnis or vice versa, if they are Christians they fear both, if they are atheists all three. The fact that some of them do not help should motivate us to help more.

 "First are our homeless!!" the unemployed, fighting child poverty, etc.  - You will always have poor people with you, Jesus says, inequalities and problems will always exist, if we wait to solve these first, and then dedicate ourselves to others, we will do nothing for one or the other. "First the bread that is in the oven", this is an urgent problem that requires a solution now; There are men, women and children exhausted after a long journey living in camps, in subhuman conditions, who will not survive this winter.

"If they are refugees, why are most of them men?!" There are women and children, whole families among the refugees, but it is easy to understand the fact that many of them are men. In our immigration, men also went first. The men go in search of a better place and conditions, so that they can then bring their families, without having to subject them to a journey that could lead to death.

"Refugees are a Trojan horse of the Islamic State!" The current refugee crisis is a direct consequence of the civil war in Syria. What is commonly understood as the Islamization of Europe is a phenomenon that has been going on for a long time and is largely more of an Islamophobic myth, or a conspiracy theory, than anything else.

Even if the EU were to accept the 4 million refugees, and all of them were Muslims, the total number of Muslims would only increase by 1 percent, from the current 4 percent to 5 percent. The conspiracy theory also says that Muslims grow more than Christians; The fact is that once here the growth rate is the same as that of other Europeans. In Syria, the population was declining before the civil war.

They also say that crime increases. Experience tells us that when they get a job they start to pay into the system and Europe really needs them. By accepting them, and integrating them into our society, we have more to gain than to lose.

Faced with the so-called "potential" Islamization of Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel believes that the best response is not to close the doors, or to fight those who have already entered, but to return to the Church, have the courage to be Christians, foster dialogue, and deepen the Bible anew. This is what the undisputed leader of the European Community, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, who was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for her adequate response to the refugee crisis, even though she has lost popularity in her own country, tells us.

The refugee boy who did not drown was, as we all know, the baby Jesus. To avoid the wrath of Herod, who wanted to kill the boy, the Holy Family fled to Egypt. Fortunately, Egypt at that time was not like Europe today, and the baby Jesus was able to grow "in wisdom and grace" in Egypt until the death of the dictator.

"Deja vue"
When Germany wanted to get rid of 5 million Jews, there were several solutions on the table to the problem, before the final solution that we all know. One of these solutions was to put the Jews on convoys to Spain and from there on boats to America. The American nations refused to receive them and from Canada came the answer, none are too many.

One may find these comparisons an exaggeration or just the fact that he mentioned this episode of the Second World War. But the news says that this is the main refugee crisis after the Second World War and not long ago, at a demonstration against refugees in Eastern Europe, one of the slogans lamented that the concentration camps were not open.

Braking with the wheels or braking with the engine
When on motorways we encounter slopes of more than 6%, it is advisable to brake with the engine and not with the wheels. By braking with the engine, we reduce the speed at its origin, overcoming inertia and the force of gravity, in an efficient and safe way; On the contrary, when we do not act on the origin of the movement, but on its manifestation in the wheels, we destabilize the car and can cause an accident, because one wheel can brake more than the other and because we do nothing about the inertia and force of gravity, which continue to push the car forward.

It is true that we must stop the movement of refugees, but we must stop it at its source, not when they are already on our doorstep. When the European Union had an agreement with Gaddafi's Libya to prevent refugees from crossing the Mediterranean, it was braking with its wheels. Britain wants them to stay in France, the French want them to stay in Italy, the Italians want them to stay in Greece, and the Greeks, like the rest of the Europeans, want them to stay in Turkey. The same is now being done with the agreement with Turkey to prevent them from moving over to Europe; Or what some countries do that let them pass so that the problem has the next country. While this is happening, some Eastern European countries are already building walls on their borders.

It would be trying to resolve the conflict in Syria, which is difficult; the Syrians alone have already proven over 4 years that they can't; the world powers are as biased as the factions inside Syria. The last peace conference, held in Vienna, revealed that the world in relation to Syria is also divided in a kind of "cold civil war"; I fear that as long as it does not end, that is, as long as the United States, Russia and Iran do not come to an agreement, hostilities in Syria and the flow of refugees will not end.

The Refugee Boy Who Didn't Drown
It's been a few months since the body of a refugee boy washed ashore, unleashing a wave of solidarity. Let us remember this Christmas that the child Jesus, fleeing from the wrath of Herod who wanted to kill him, also had to seek refuge in another country. As it was for the good of humanity that the escape of the Holy Family succeeded, so are all escapes and so are all escapes.

Fr. Jorge ours, IMC

Consecrated for the Mission

Fr. Jorge with blind kids in Shashemane, Ethiopia

Who I am, Where I came from, Where I am going
I want to conclude this reflection on consecrated life with my own testimony as a priest belonging to a Missionary Religious Order. I am originally from Loriga, a village in the municipality of Seia, nestled in the Serra da Estrela mountain range in Portugal. For the past 30 years I have been living in various countries at the service of the Mission: Ethiopia, Spain, England, Canada, United States and now Portugal.

Since I knew at the age of six that I wanted to be what I am today, it is very difficult for me to understand and help young adults in their vocational discernment; for this same reason, it is also hard for me to comprehend why so many priests have given up the missionary religious orders to become diocesan priests. They have ceased to be fishers of men, like Jesus wanted his disciples to be, to become instead, shepherds of a flock that despite their efforts is getting increasingly smaller.

It is true, however, that the reason which led me to choose this life is not the same reason that keeps me in it now. My vocation emerged one day when a missionary came to my school and spoke of his adventures in Africa with so much enthusiasm that it soon awakened in my young heart the eagerness to one day become as adventurous as him. Later, of course, I discovered that the taste for adventure was only the bait that God had used to catch for Himself my boyish heart. Like a fish, I was caught by God so He could transform me later on, just like the apostles, into a fisher of men.

Childhood dreams are compelling; after elementary school, at the age of ten, I felt so strongly in my resolve to become a missionary that I stood up to my parish priest when he wanted to send me to a diocesan seminary. At that time, it was not the priesthood that appealed to me the most, nor is it even now, but rather the life of a missionary. After failed attempts to enter the Missionaries of the Divine Word in Tortosendo and the Comboni Fathers of Viseu, I joined the Consolata Missionaries, in Vila Nova of Poiares at the suggestion of the very same parish priest who, faced with my persistence, finally gave in.

“To leave life in pieces scattered throughout the world”
Belonging to the same Catholic Church, the Religious Orders exist somewhat outside the structure of the Church divided into dioceses and parishes. Of these religious orders some are contemplative following the rule of St. Benedict of “Ora et Labora” which consists of a life completely dedicated to prayer and to contemplation on the mysteries of God.

Today this way of living is much discredited by the craze of modern times, where human life seems to be justified by works and by the ‘busyness’ of a person. Faced with this frenzy of activity, the contemplative life reminds us well that what is most important in life is the being rather than the doing. Since we are predestined for heaven where we will be spending the whole of eternity praising God, why not do it already in the few years we have left before eternity?

Other religious orders are active and so the members dedicate themselves according to their charisms to many different activities in the fields of education, physical and mental health, the promotion of human dignity etc. My charism, I say it with the conviction of my founder the Blessed Joseph Allamano, is the most perfect charism of the Church, the Mission. It is in fact the very reason by which and for which the Church exists: to take the Gospel to every creature, to take Christ to all the peoples and/or to bring all peoples to the knowledge of Him.

There are those who live their lives always in the same place, surrounded by the same people, and always doing the same thing. There are priests in Portugal who have been at the service of the same community for more than 50 years. As for myself, I knew very early on that my life would not be lived in this way. In fact, since I was 10 years old when I joined the Order, I have never been in one place for more than 3 to 4 years.

I compare my life to a puzzle with pieces scattered in distant places, among people of different ethnicities, languages, groups and nations. When I come to the end of my life and all the pieces have been gathered and put together, I hope that as a whole, they will form an image that is pleasing to God. A missionary is a person without limit and without border, a pilgrim ever seeking the way where no sunrise finds him where the sunset left him, quoting Kalil Gibran from his book, “The Prophet”.

To be consecrated means to be set apart, reserved for an extraordinary service which requires, from the part of the candidate, to put aside what sets and forms the lives of most people. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are common to all the consecrated. They do not possess material goods in order to dedicate themselves exclusively to the cultivation of spiritual goods; they love universally with a love that does not exclude anyone, therefore their embrace is open; they do not seek power, or possessions, or fame so they can submit themselves to the designs that God has for them, obeying Him through the superiors and the signs of times.

The ones who have been consecrated for the Mission still echo within them today those words of the Master “to go to all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature”. Just like a cellphone tower, a missionary receives the signal, in this case the signal of faith, magnifies it and broadcasts it within its range to the next tower so in this same manner faith is transmitted from generation to generation, from people to people, from nation to nation.

Missionary yesterday, today and tomorrow
If I had known at six years old what I know today, thirty years since my ordination, I would still have chosen the missionary life. I can identify so well with the intuition that I had at six and the choice that I made at ten that it could not have been only of human origin; it was a true calling from God. I could never identify myself with the flightless birds but rather with the eagles soaring without limits of frontiers and languages, without prejudices against other peoples and without disproportionate and paralyzing attachments to my family, my country, my parents and my culture.

I recall one day while I was on vacation and on the eve of returning to Ethiopia, my father tried to convince me not to return, saying that the years I’ve already spent in Ethiopia were enough and that here in Portugal I could also find mission work and etc. My mother overheard and shouted at him saying, “Be quiet, man, for God can punish you”, and my father immediately quieted down. God, who already has my mother with Him, must be very pleased with her because she was not a mother hen; she was a mother who knew how to suppress her maternal instincts, something that many parents nowadays do not seem to manage.

How many vocations to the religious life and to the priesthood have been lost because of parents who cling so tightly to their children, depriving them of the “freedom to be children of God” and many of these parents are even practicing Catholics! I’ve always wondered to myself with what face will they appear before God, when they did everything to destroy the vocation to the consecrated life of their sons and daughters.

The mission is at its beginning
I will never be unemployed; it was Pope John Paul II who said that the mission is at its beginning. The larger continents are still under-evangelized so there will be no shortage of work. Furthermore, many countries that were once Christian have abandoned the faith and now live in a sort of modern paganism, worshiping or paying homage to a variety of gods. They no longer baptize their children nor send them to Sunday school; for this reason, a possible encounter with the Gospel for them can be seen to be as much of a first evangelization as that of a person in the Far East who hears about Christ for the first time.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Thwarted vocations

Because our life is spatial and temporal, Christ could only exist once in human flesh. However, He did not come to save only the people of his time and country but also all humanity. He also came for all who existed before Him, this is why the Scripture says that He descended into hell after His resurrection. He even came for all those who will come after Him of which He himself spoke about in the episode of his apparition to the ten and Thomas when He stated that happy are those who believe and yet have not seen. Those who will live after Christ are also mentioned in the priestly prayer when Jesus asks for all to believe in the witness of the apostles.

Christ, who is the salvation of all people at all times and in all places, had to find some way so that this salvation was in fact extended to all times and places.

The Church is Christ in all times and all places
…I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Mt. 28:20)

The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the way in which Christ arranged to pass his message and deeds through time and space. He himself has said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…” (Jn. 14:12). God is not limited by the coordinates of time and space; Christ is God but, as long as He was living in the flesh among men, He was also restricted by these coordinates.

Christ is the way, the truth and the life for men of all times and places. The Church is all of us, but within the Church, there are charisms which require a special calling because they need special consecrations. Priests and religious are at the service of the Mission and the universal fraternity because they have consecrated their entire lives to this service, and as the Spaniards like to say, they’ve put all the meat on the grill.

Presumably Christ continues to call, perhaps more so now than ever before, for shepherds as the flock increases and for fishers of men as the harvest is even more plentiful (Mt. 9:32-28). If Christ continues to call, then why is it that today there are increasingly fewer missionaries, people who are willing to leave their countries and their families to take the Gospel to other latitudes and longitudes? If Christ continues to call, why is it that the clergy is getting increasingly more elderly, and there are priests with 3 or 4 or even 5 or more parishes to look after?

As in the parable of the sower, the problem is not in the seed nor in the sower who is Christ. The problem lies in the different soils on which this seed falls. Christ continues to call but the response to this calling is each time more like that of the rich young man’s…

Bad examples
One of the reasons for the shortage of vocations is the bad examples that some of us priests and religious give to the world. It is precisely the scandal involving little ones to which the Gospel speaks about; each one of us can either be a sidewalk stone, which makes a path easier or a stumbling stone, which causes people to fall. In Greek, the word scandal even means stumbling stone.

It is a fact that due to the scandal of pedophilia many people have left the Church; but they who left were the “little ones” of the Gospel, those of little faith or of a faith that needed to grow to become mature. In a basket of apples, it is inevitable that there will be some rotten ones. This has already happened in the early days of the Church with the group of 12 apostles whom Jesus chose; one of them, Judas Iscariot, was a traitor.

Those who left Christ’s Church, because of the scandal of some priests, show that their faith was not in Christ but rather in the priest in question.  They threw away the baby with the bath water; they threw away faith in Christ and Christ Himself because of the bad example of one Christian.

The Holy Order is a sacrament, the priest represents Christ and acts in the name of Christ, but he is not Christ. Just as there are good actors and bad actors, there are priests who represent Christ well and those who represent Him poorly. A priest is an icon of Christ, and our faith is in Him who he represents and not in the priest himself.

Self-referential youths
Don’t ask what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy

A 17-year old young woman said to me in school, “Instead of believing in God I believe in myself, therefore I am my own god”. Like her, many young people today do not have any ideals, and being self-referential, their lives revolve only around themselves. The world has much to offer and the young people look at the world not as a plentiful harvest where the labourers are few but rather as a large buffet filled with beautiful and pleasant things that they do not want to miss out on. For them to obtain these goods is to gain life and to renounce them or be deprived of them is to lose life. Thinking in this way, they cannot understand when Christ said, “Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (Jn. 12:25)

Majority of saints in the Catholic Church were from wealthy, noble and prominent families. They had everything that these mislaid young people of today so desire, and yet they left everything behind and considered all that as rubbish so they may gain Christ (Phil. 3:7-10). Just like St. Paul, these handsome and noble young people not only renounced money but also found in Christ an even greater treasure like the merchant in search of fine pearls who on finding one pearl of great value put all others aside (Matt. 13:45-46). It is a pity that today’s young people have never encountered Christ.

For them, they find it very difficult to accept that their lives are not about themselves; that their life is a relative value and what gives it meaning is what they do or do not do with it. Beethoven without his music would have been a Mr. Nobody; the same could have been said about Picasso without his paintings; the individual talents are geared above all to the common good and only after to the good of the individual. We do not live to be happy but rather we live to be useful to the society, and in so doing we become happy; if not, then we are useless even to ourselves.

The fact that we are social beings can be proven by what happens when we share our sadness with a friend, we become less sad. Similarly, we become happier when we share our happiness with others. The social well-being harmonizes itself to the well-being of the individual and vice versa; no one is happy surrounded by misfortune, nor is one happy at the expense of others, but only if one contributes to their happiness.

Happiness is the secondary effect of our altruism, the principal effect being the well-being of others. No one takes a medicine for its secondary effect but rather for its principal effect; all our action has a feedback, a return, a boomerang effect; that is, what goes around comes around.

Jesus said of himself, “I came to the world to serve and not to be served”. It is true that nobody would say, at least in public, that we came into this world to be served. However if we put our hypocrisy aside and are honest with ourselves, we will see that it is not to serve that we seek but rather to gain power, to be served by those beneath us, and this is why we are so unhappy.

The true path to greatness is in fact by serving. The great people in our lives were the ones who served us and not those who made use of us or dominated us. The great people in the history of mankind were also those who served and not those who made use of others like Hitler, Stalin and so many other dictators…

The devils of God the patronizing parents
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Mk. 8:31-33)

God is calling each one of us all the time. Nevertheless only a few young people say ‘yes’ to Him, and after winning the battles against self-reference and the beckoning of the consumer society, they still have to win over those who are the closest to them, their parents. Some parents, who are guided more by maternal instinct than by a true fatherly and motherly love, are opposed to God like Peter was to Jesus. Since they object the plans of God, then in the same manner that Jesus called Peter, these patronizing parents also ought to be called Satan or the Devil, which means the adversary.

There are countless stories of parents who had opposed their children and “fought tooth and nail” to prevent them from following the life to which God has called them. A father stopped talking to his daughter for 30 years for having rejected marriage in favor of becoming a missionary. Other parents, when they were unable to dissuade their children completely from God’s calling, resorted to influencing them in their choice of vocation from missionary to diocesan priesthood instead so that they could still keep them under their wings.

A priest whose father being a doctor forced his son to follow a career in medicine, upon finishing the medical program out of love and respect for his father, on the day of his graduation he handed his degree to his father saying, “Here is what you wanted from me, now I’m going to do what God wants of me…”.

I myself will always be grateful to my mother because she neither actively nor passively tried to divert me from my path. I still remember the day when upon hearing my father trying to convince me not to return to Ethiopia after my first three years there, she reprimanded him in a strong voice saying, “Be quiet man, for God can condemn you”. It is true that God does not condemn but neither would I want to be in the place of these parents on the day they stand before Him and try to explain their devilish position, opponents of His design with respect to their children.

Advice to the parents
Many mothers and fathers never completely cut off the umbilical cord, they love with a possessive and patronizing love that creates dependence and impotence, never leaving their children and always wanting to have a voice and to play a part in their lives, even when their children are married.

A good education is one that seeks to instill freedom, autonomy and independence in the learners. A good educator has as an objective to be no longer needed. Contrary to this, many parents always want to feel that they are essential in the lives of their children, eventually pushing them away in so doing.

Advice to the children
The opposition of those dearest to us is not something that Jesus had not already contemplated:

‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…’ (Matt. 10:34-37)

To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ (Lk. 9:59-62)

As in the past, Christ continues to call. The young people however, invaded by the ego of their parents and overshadowed by the creatures -- the world of today that seems to have so much to offer them -- turn their backs on the Creator and the only Lord of all.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Obedience is due to God alone

We must obey God rather than any human authority. (Acts 5:29)

Throughout the course of this year’s reflection on Consecrated Life, I've always been careful to refer to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience not only as virtues for monks, friars, priests and nuns, but also as human values that are relevant to all who want to live their lives according to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To put it simply, we could say that the vow of poverty defines and guides us in our relation with material things, the vow of chastity in our relation with people, and the vow of obedience in our relation with God. It is true that they all have implications with these three realities but it is also true that for each vow one of the three predominates.

With respect to the vow of obedience quoted in the passage above, the apostles refused to obey the Sanhedrin which was the highest authority of the people of Israel, composed of the High Priests, the Scribes, the Pharisees and the Elders, a total of 71 members. They justified this civil disobedience with their understanding that they ought to, above all, obey God not men.

Our place in the world
But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. (Mt. 6:33-34)

It is obedience that awakens us from the self-serving individual dreams of greatness and gives us the conviction that, as citizens of this world, we are here not for ourselves as our lives are not about us. Obedience recognizes and appreciates, at the same time, the rights and the obligations that all individuals have of belonging, participating and possessing a place in the history of humanity.

It is true that each one of us is an autonomous, independent and free living human being, and yet our individuality cannot be explained on its own; I would not have existed without the prior existence and coexistence of my father and mother. We are at the same time free and interdependent beings because we are all part of a family, of a community, of a country, of humanity.

The opportunity was given to a student to observe bacteria under the microscope. He could in fact see how a generation of this microscopic living organisms arose, grew, reproduced and died, leaving its place to the next generation. He saw, as he had never seen before, life being transmitted from one generation to the next. Understanding the lesson underlying this observation, that the value of his own life depended on how it occupied the space in the broader context of the common good, he said, "I pledge not be a weak link in life".

This story suggests that humanity is also a succession of generations interconnected like in a relay race. After finding our place in the world so that our life is productive and not necessarily reproductive, we ought to make it a contribution to the progress of humanity; we need to pledge to leave this world a better place than we found it. In this context, Obedience is therefore my participation and contribution to the building of a better world, the Kingdom of God.

No one finds self-fulfillment outside the community or against the community; in other words, there is no self-realization that is not a contribution to the community. We only feel good about ourselves when others feel good about us. It is only by appreciating others that we appreciate ourselves, and it is by recognizing the rights of others that we recognize ours. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, each one of our small steps or successes is a leap for mankind.

In order for this to occur, as suggested by Jesus in the passage above, we need to first seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice; that is, with an attitude of obedience to God, we must resist all temptations to satisfy our own needs for it is only in so doing that happiness and self-fulfillment will be at our reach. Indeed the passage even suggests that we need not worry about these needs because in the process of seeking the Kingdom of God, that is, fulfilling the task which God has called us to, our needs will be naturally fulfilled.

As baptized Christians, we are all part of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church; as such, we are called to act in the here and now of the human history, the work of salvation which Christ started 2000 years ago. Since Christ could not live twice in a physical body, and since his salvation is for all humanity and not only for his contemporaries, all Christians, of each time and place, are called to be Christ's mouth, eyes, ears, arms and legs. From this perspective, the obedience of each and every Christian resembles the active compliance of each and all individual members as it happens in a physical body, to attain harmony and the greater good of the entire body.

The thirst for power
Pilate therefore said to him, "Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin." (Jn. 19:10-11)

Unlike all other nations, the people of Israel never really wanted to have a king. Their only King was God, who time and time again raised a leader to guide and govern them according to His statutes and decrees. Throughout the history of humanity, all who had power attributed it in some way to God as its source or that they were exercising it on behalf of God, the only and one true Almighty. The association and identification of God with power led some Roman emperors to even proclaim themselves as gods.

Francisco Franco, caudilho de España por la gracia de Dios (Francisco Franco, the leader of Spain by the grace of God)–Thus was minted on the Spanish coins during the period of fascism in Spain. Recognizing that he himself did not have the right to occupy the position he claimed, because he was neither the elected president of the republic nor the son of a monarch, Franco resorted to this deception which, in its own way, affirms the fact that real power comes from God, and is delegated temporarily to this or that leader.

The acknowledgement that all authority comes from God and that He is above all powers, is exactly what St. Thomas More meant to say when one day while in prayer he was interrupted several times by a messenger of King Henry VIII who demanded to see him right away. With a calm that was characteristic of him, the saint said to the messenger, “Go and tell his majesty that at the moment I am busy with someone greater than him, the King of the Universe.”

Dura lex sed lex – The law is hard but it is the law. The whims and caprices of a dictator, or of someone who abuses the power delegated to him and governs as he pleases, makes the law much harder to bear. But being the law, equal for all in principle and by principle, it makes everyone equal under it. The ruling of the law, or the supremacy of Morals or Ethics, is the image of God’s supremacy since He is the Father of us all, and we are all equal before Him—hence in here lies the foundation of the dignity of a human person.

Voice of the people voice of God – In democracy the power resides in the people and always in the people. Since the people cannot rule as a whole, the power is periodically delegated to the ones who represent them in the governing of the nation. The same thing applies within a Religious Order; the power rests in the confreres who also periodically delegate it by elections to the so called Superior or Abbot.

Since the vow of obedience is made to God, to Him is also vowed the obedience that is mediated by or through a superior. Striving to act exclusively on the will of God, the superior of a religious order represents also the commitment that each individual religious makes to God, the community and the Church in general.

The vow of obedience
They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me… (Jn. 14:21)

Since the disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which evil entered the world, the history of Israel could be read as one where obedience is always tampered with disobedience. For Jesus it is only through obedience to the Word of God, which means by acting on it, that a person is able to build his house on rock; any other way it is inconsequential, leads to nothing, and the house is blown away by the wind. (Mt. 7:24-27)

Jesus called all who heard him to accept and obey his teachings, to incorporate them in their daily lives, and to imprint them into their day-to-day attitude and behaviour. However, Jesus also called twelve men from their previous lives, jobs and families, to have them at his complete disposal; to them, he told in complete detail how to behave, what to do, where to go, how to go and what to say.

Obedience is due to God alone and the religious vow of obedience cannot be an exception. This happens not because we belong to an institution that needs an authority but because we need mediations between us and God. The vow is based then on the faith that the will of God comes by means of a governing body.

For this reason, the first objective of obedience, what is most important, is not the structuring of the Community but the self-fulfillment of each one of its members; thus, obedience has less to do with the submission or the renunciation of one’s will and more to do with the affirmation of God’s will, despite the desires and opposing forces that operate within us and within the superiors.

It is therefore no longer our will which alienates us from God after we’ve freely decided to devote ourselves to the Kingdom of Heaven, quite the opposite, it is the evil that resides within us which in every moment antagonizes our fundamental choice. Lastly, and as Jesus puts it, obedience is a result of love, I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. (Jn. 14:31)

Coordinator of charisms
But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father – the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Mt. 23:8-12)

Abbot, primus inter pares, prior, provincial, responsible, and superior are some of the titles that were given throughout history to that person who, elected by the majority, represents what we promise to God, the sacrament of divine authority to whom we ultimately owe obedience. All these titles in some form or other go against the passage quoted above because they put this person at a level above all others.

To my understanding, the best title for this position is coordinator of charisms, because each brother or sister has different charisms and for all these charisms to work harmoniously, with the view of forming one single body and for the greater good, it is necessary that there be a coordinator.

As the coordinator of charisms, the function of the “superior” is directed more to the community as a whole than to each of its members in parts. Each religious person is governed by his or her own conscience, and is therefore, apart from God, not obligated to satisfy anyone. As free and independent beings, we do not need anyone to tell us what we should or should not do.

As the idea of a coordinator of charism implies, in each community there is the need of a person who, like the maestro of an orchestra, harmonizes the distinct individuals to work in unison. In an orchestra, each musician plays a different instrument, each with its own unique and distinct sound; it is left up to the maestro, following a general score to which he himself obeys, to merge the contributions of all the different musicians into one beautiful melody.

So it must also be inside a religious community where each person should be above all truthful and faithful to himself and to his project or Mission, all the while bearing in mind that this would not make any sense unless it fits within the context of the common good safeguarded by the coordinator.

In case of conflict
Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.  Benjamin Franklin

Power does not always corrupt, but when it does it can even corrupt the one who in the community has the faculty to coordinate the charisms of all for the common good. The coordinator as well as the members of the community need to always be permanently within earshot of God and in dialogue with each other so that coordination and obedience are carried out according to the will of God.

We must always obey when what is asked of us goes according to our project and to what we have promised to God. However, if a member of the community has determined with all certainty that the coordinator demands obedience for reasons that are not in keeping with the will of God, in all good conscience, the member of the community can and should disobey because this type of disobedience is in fact obedience to God.

In the lack of this certainty, in case of doubt, it is preferable to obey; it will require certainly an act of faith in the coordinator but throughout the history of salvation, as it has been described in the Bible since Abraham, there are numerous examples where the question of obedience turned, many times, into a question of faith... either you believe, risk, trust and throw yourself knowingly into the dark abyss or you don’t believe, retreat and stay paralyzed.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

To be obedient is to be faithful

After reclaiming freedom from the bondage of our past and being able to commit or invest our time and energy to a fundamental choice, obedience now becomes a question of fidelity to these chosen commitments.

Obedience to the truth
“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.” (1Peter 1: 22)

Jesus did not say that he was one of the ways, one of the truths and one of the modes of living; there is only one way, one truth and one life and that is Jesus. In this same way, there is only one human nature which stays unchanged over the course of centuries and millennia.  For example, what was love two thousand years ago remains love today and will be love five thousand years from now if the human race still exists.

Human Nature is not like the fashion which is susceptible to changes over time, and because it is immutable, in Christ, God has spoken once and for all eternity everything that He wants to impart to us. This is also the reason why the Gospel is called the Word of Eternal Life for although it is the Word of God incarnated in a particular time two thousand years ago, and in a particular place in Israel, it continues to be true in all places today and until the end of time because the diversity of culture or civilization does not alter human nature.

“... Whoever does not gather with me, scatters.”(Lk. 11:23)
The main reason why God became a man is to teach us how to live the human life; therefore the way Jesus of Nazareth  lived, what he said, what he did and how he behaved are paradigmatic, he is the gold standard, the role model for all human beings seeking self-fulfillment and happiness.

Since to imitate Jesus is the only way to live life in accordance with the human nature created by God, although it may seem unappealing but freedom is nothing else than the obligation to do good, that is, to choose Jesus’ way of living.  We are free for as long as we remain on His path; we loose our freedom when we get off His path, and set off on our own. Obedience is understood as the full submission to the truth because it is the truth, and only the truth, that makes and keeps us free. There is no authentic human life outside the parameters of human nature that God created and which the Gospel establishes.

As the Word of eternal life, the Gospel delineates our human nature and, at the same time, teaches us how to live in accordance with it. Obedience to this Word is absolutely necessary in order for our life to be as meaningful to us as it is to others and to the world in general. It is evident that we are free by the very fact that we can reject this only way of Life; that is to say we are free up until the very moment we choose to reject it. When we freely choose to dismiss the Gospel as the Magna Carta of our human life, we suffer the consequences that arise from going against our human nature.

Let us take an example from our physiological nature. In particular, the drinking of wine which taken by itself is not intrinsically evil, as opposed to what many Christian Fundamentalists claim, even going as far as rewriting the Bible, thus creating a “dry” Gospel which states that what the apostles drank during the Last Supper was grape juice and not wine.

It has been shown that drinking in moderation, especially red wine, far from being harmful, is in fact beneficial to our health. How can we then define or quantify moderation? Moderation is best quantified as the amount of alcohol that our liver can safely process. Once this quantity is formalized, our drinking habit has to be adjusted accordingly; to drink beyond this amount is to challenge and disobey our physiological nature, thus ruining our health.

Once again I quote Erich Fromm from his book, “To Have or To Be”, “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure”. Hence, to take pleasure outside the limit of reality is the same as denying it, a “contraditio em terminis”.

Jesus of Nazareth the model of obedience
Jesus came into this world through the obedience of Mary, and while growing up in Nazareth, he was obedient to his parents (Lk. 2:51). During his adulthood, at every moment, he did the will of his Father and not his own; it can be said that the will of the Father had become his food (Jn. 4:34) and so great was this communion, between the Father and the Son, that “...the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing...” (Jn. 5:19).

The Letter to the Hebrews (5:8) suggests that Jesus’ obedience was not innate, but the result of a learning process where suffering played a crucial role, culminating to the point of death on the cross (Phil. 2:8). In the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the learning process of obedience ran parallel with two other progressions: the awareness of his identiy as the Son of God, and the awareness of his mission as the Redeemer of humanity.

“The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands” (Jn. 3:35).  Far from being forced, to obey his Father was for Jesus something connatural with his nature and identity. In essence this was something he had chosen, his fundamental choice motivated by the love he has for his Father, because he and the Father are one (Jn. 10:30).

Obedience is fidelity
Once there was a man who loved gold so much that it became a consuming obsession for him. Gold occupied his mind and his heart to the point that all that were not gold did not exist for him; whenever he went shopping he only had eyes for the window displays of jewelry shops, he saw nothing else, or no one else; he saw neither people, nor blue sky, nor heard the noise of the city, nor smelled the scent of flowers. One day when he could resist no longer, he broke into a jewelry store and began to fill his pockets with gold rings, gold bracelets and gold chains; he was getting ready to flee when he was apprehended. Confounded, the policeman asked him, “How did you ever think you were going to escape a store full of people?” To that he answered, “What people? I saw no one, I only saw the gold”.

Just as we owe obedience to our physiological nature, we also owe obedience to our supernatural nature, which is our vocation or our fundamental choice, like Jesus did. All our time and energy ought to be dedicated to the vocation that we choose, with the same determination as the gold lover in the story.

“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk. 9:62). Obedience is the faithness to all that God calls us to do and to become.  Therefore once we commit our time and energy to the fundamental option of our choosing, it is the faithfullness to this commmitment which fuels the initial call and keeps our vocation strong. For instance, those who initially answer the call of love by choosing marriage, will find that it is the faithness to this commitment that will keep, uphold and nurture the love later on.

Lookout for the rules, so the rules will lookout for you
In life, we obey more often than we would like to admit; we obey our body when it is hungry and asking for food and when it is thirsty and asking for water; we adhere to these and many other directives relating to our basic bodily needs and we do them without even thinking, because we know that they exist for our own good.

In addition to the physiological needs, we also have social necessities. Being the social creatures that we are, we grow up interacting with others with whom we form groups. The existence and the permanency of these groups demand that there be rules which define their identities and their objectives. These rules are heeded by all the members, not only because the rules were made by them, but also because the group fulfills the social needs of each and every one of its members all the while seeking the common good.

Keep the rules and the rules will keep you - Everywhere we turn there are rules. In life, we are free to choose the game that we want to play; once we make that choice we must then abide by its rules. By heeding them, they will act as lookouts for us, giving us a sense of belonging and security.

The alternative would be not to choose, keeping all the options open, setting up camp on a crossroad, not investing nor committing time and energy to any project or to anyone like the foolish servant in the parable of the talents, who hid the talent that he received. It is true that by not choosing we remain free but one day, near the end of our lives, we will realize that we have never actually lived because we have wasted our time and energy in futilities by going against our human nature.

More than just surviving, being human means to implicate, to commit our time and energy to a project of social benefit. What is good for the community is good for us. When we are not useful to others we are useless even to ourselves; our life will only be meaningful to us if it is significant to others.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The intersection of life

As it was suggested in the previous article on the topic of obedience, when our behaviour ceases to be reactive, that is, manifest uncontrollable responses to external stimulus, and becomes proactive, that is, planned and decided freely by our reason -- specifically, when we are in possession of ourselves and are consciously in command of our actions -- then we are free and able to do whatever we want, or better still, whatever God wants from us and for us.

At that moment, we would feel as if our lives were in our hands, filled with the time and energy needed to devote ourselves to something worthwhile. When we spoke about chastity, we concluded that life is in fact made up of time + energy + fundamental choice. We also noted that animals and plants, indeed all living beings in general, are formed by time and energy governed by nature; only humans have self-awareness, are conscious of possessing time and energy, and know that is up to them and not nature to regulate, use, and give meaning and purpose to their lives.

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life... (Jn. 6:27) -- After the multiplication of loaves, the crowds thinking that they have found the golden egg hen, went looking for more bread, like the Samaritan woman who went every day to the well to search for more water. Jesus advised them that for this sort of bread that keeps them alive, they would have to work. “God feeds the birds of the air but he does not put the food in their nests", the birds do have to go out and collect this food which God provides for them in nature. Whoever does not want to work should not eat, says St. Paul; the bread that sustains our physical life must come from our sweat and labour.

Like the life of other living beings, our lives also cannot be reduced to the vicious circle of work to eat and eat to work, not even to bread and circus as the Romans used to say, i.e. bread and fun. To be alive and to live are not the same thing; we do not live to stay alive but rather we are alive in order to live. Against this backdrop how sad it is, and senseless, are the lives of those who waste their time and energy pursuing means of life, that is, wasting their lives making more and more money thinking that by so doing they can increase their lifespan. "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Lk. 12:20)

Hence Jesus warned us to work not so much for the bread that perishes but to spend our time and energy to work for the bread that endures for eternity; and rather than just a little time, the gospel suggests that this should be the main activity of our lives: Therefore do not worry, saying, "What will we eat?" or "What will we drink?" or "What will we wear?" For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all the things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matt. 6:31-33)

Jesus is the bread we are the bread
Jesus' discourse on the Eucharist ends with the declaration that he is the bread, and therefore whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood is the one who has eternal life; something that the Jews and many of Jesus' disciples could not bring themselves to accept fearing others would see them as cannibals and vampires. For this reason they abandoned the Master and Peter speaking on behalf of the remaining few recognized that these words of Jesus were words of eternal life, that is, words that lead to life eternal.

The nature of the bread that lasts for eternal life, which nourishes and makes the eternal life possible, is different from the bread that feeds this life and perishes. Just as the water that Jesus promised the Samaritan woman, this bread also comes from within.

Furthermore, Jesus being the way, the truth and the life, is the person whom we need to imitate to stay in the truth and to have an authentic life -- the only way that leads to the Father and to eternal life. For this reason just as Jesus is the bread we too are called to be bread. We are then the time and the energy that feed and give life to the human value or cause which becomes our fundamental choice. So, just like Christ, we too are called to "put all the meat on the grill" as a Spanish saying would have it.

The fundamental option as a commitment
The fundamental option is the decision that takes over our whole life, it is the objective, the goal, and what gives meaning, colour and flavour to everything each and every day of our lives. It is the flame that is kept burning by the fuel of our life, i.e. our time and energy. It is the point of support of the lever that raises the world in Archimedes' principle. It is the motivation, the inspiration that brings together all our resources and puts them at the service of a goal, a target that we have chosen.

Life is made up of many choices and decisions; they are what give colour, flavour, aroma and meaning to our existence. These small choices generally affect us in one or more ways and may impact us a little or a lot but never to the point of changing our entire life. The fundamental choice, however, is the decision of all decisions, the master choice, the mother of all choices because it influences our present and our future; for the most part it is irreversible; it is the reason of our being. It is the purpose to which we give our time and energy; it is the mouth to which we are the bread.

The cause, or fundamental choice, to which Nelson Mandela fed with his life was to end Apartheid in South Africa; for Beethoven, it was the music, for Picasso, to paint, for Gandhi, it was the independence of India through nonviolent means; for some parents, their children; for the teachers, their students; for the doctors, the sick... More than a profession, life becomes a mission.

There is no life without commitment
They live as if they will not die... and die as if they had never lived. Dalai Lama

When it comes the time to make our fundamental choice, we are at the crossroad of our lives or in a more up-to-date way of thinking, at least in Europe, we are at the roundabout of our lives. We cannot stay there forever, or for a longer period than it is acceptable. Often when we remain undecided for too long, life ends up deciding for us, or the government does as is the case in some countries with respect to the unions of young unmarried couples who live together where after some time, the state considers them married. In Lisbon there is a roundabout known as "the clock roundabout" because at the center of that roundabout there is a big clock. It is as if it was telling us that while we remain undecided, time passes, and some opportunities do not appear a second time in life...

"I want to keep all my options open" -- I used to often hear this said by young Americans and Canadians. During childhood and early youth, everything is in fact open. But to keep your options forever open would be like being one of those statues we often see in the middle of an intersection; avoiding all commitments in order to be free is like being alive but not living and risking dying without ever having lived.

For those who do not know where to go there are no favourable winds -- "You can't have your cake and eat it too"; "You can't have the sun in the threshing floor and the rain in the meadow". At an intersection or in a roundabout, to choose a path, to say 'yes' to a path, means to say 'no' to all others. You cannot compromise; life ends up being heavily penalized for those who pretend to live more than one life; often to those who want everything they end up losing everything instead... To marry a woman means to say 'no' to all others; to be ordained as a priest means to say 'no' to marriage. To immigrate to a country means to leave behind one's own. All of us were or will one day be at the crossroad or the roundabout of our existence: that is the day when we take our life in our own hands and decide what to do with it.

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life ... No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. (Jn. 10:17-18) -- We were free while stopped at the intersection deciding on which path to take; we are free while going around in a roundabout without choosing a path; life is a gift and only by giving it up can it be lived. We have no choice, in fact, we either give our life or it is taken away from us, like the one who hid his talent. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 16:25)

Absolute freedom does not exist nor would it serve any purpose. We are free until the moment when we voluntarily sacrifice this freedom in a commitment to life, to society and to the world. From that moment on, we begin our obedience to that commitment. Freedom exists in life only to be delivered. Once we are committed to the fundamental choice we no longer possess ourselves, after that to live is to obey...

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The truth will set you free

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matt 5:16)

After unveiling, in the previous articles, the vows of poverty and chastity, I now complete the tripod on which the religious life is supported by reflecting on the vow of obedience. The religious is called to be a beacon, a guide to lead others to Heaven by living, in the here and now, the same life that all are called to live eternally in Heaven; he is called to embody the values of the Kingdom and to guide mankind in the dialectics of wealth-detachment, love-sex, and power-freedom-fidelity with his experience in living out the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, respectively.

To know the truth
If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. (Jn. 8:31-32)

Stewards, not owners - The Church tells us that our life is not our own, but rather a gift from God; we have done nothing to merit it, nor were we consulted as to whether or not we want to live it. In its totality, life is indeed a gift. With respect to the first part of this life though, the time in which we live on earth, rather than a gift it is more like a loan. The Book of Genesis says that God made man from dust and breathed into his nostrils to give him life. By the same manner that He breathed in and we started to live, one day He will breathe out and we shall die.

The indication that life is a loan is clearly seen in the parable of the talents. All loans must render interest; our lives must be profitable; they must be productive; not necessarily reproductive, but productive. We must leave this world a better place than when we found it; we have to make a difference, be part of the solution and not part of the problem; in other words, our lives should contribute to the solution of a better world, and not contribute to its problem, that is, leave the world in a worse shape than when we found it. As suggested by the parable of the talents, we need to do something with our life, we cannot return it exactly as we have received it.

All good stewards have the "books" in order because no one knows the day nor the hour when the owner, or the government auditor, will come to inspect the accounts. For this reason we need to make regular check-ups of our stewardship.  On this regard, the Church has a sacrament, the sacrament of penance; those who use this sacrament periodically, providing accounts of inputs and outputs, will know whether their finances are growing or are heading for bankruptcy. It is also an indispensable exercise of self-evaluation for personal growth at all levels.

Builders, not architects -- Every one of us comes into this world as part of a big project. We came because God willed it. The circumstances of our birth are irrelevant; they neither increase nor decrease our dignity. We are as much sons and daughters of God irrespective of how we were conceived, be it out of love, from accident, from prostitution, a night of pleasure or even as the result of a rape. Every human life that comes into this world, from conception to its natural death, is precious and viable, and therefore sacred.

God writes straight on crooked lines. Both our righteousness and our sinfulness serve to carry out God’s designs.  For Him there are no illegitimate children nor children of blue blood; to everyone He is the Father; we are all equal in dignity, heirs to the eternal life...

Just as no houses in our cities and villages are built without first being properly designed and planned, no life comes into this world without God having mapped out a project for it; that is, without Him first designing a plan.

You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. (Jn. 15:16) -- We are therefore not the designers of our destinies; we are called to be a house built on rock, if we listen to the Word, that is, if we know the plan that relates to our lives, and put it into practice, bringing it into fruition according to the plan designed by God.

Since we are not the owners of our lives we are also not the architects but rather the masons or master-of-works. The architect of everything and everyone, the Creator of all is God; the design, project or plan for our lives is with Him and for us to know what it is we need to periodically consult Him, as we build our lives, our homes.

The builder who does not consult the architect on a regular basis runs the risk of building something not according to the plan. Just as it is always embarrassing when this happens in our cities, houses that were not given the permit to be inhabited, some even to the point of needing to be torn down because they were not built according to the drawing.  A worse embarrassment still is to stand before God with a life lived against His will.

The regular consultation, continuous and constant, that the builder must make with the architect is called prayer. Jesus used to spend the whole night in prayer to know what God’s will was for him. We too must do likewise because it is His will and not ours that we must act upon. It is He who calls us and gives us the vocation and sufficient talents to make our lives viable in a profession or a mission.

Just as the builder only asks for the instructions of the foundation when he is working on the foundation, and not for the instructions of the roof, because the time has not yet come to build it, prayer should be a continuous and constant process that goes step by step with the building of our lives. The vision of the whole and the ensemble, the design as well as the model of the plan, only God has them and only at the end will we see and be confronted with the final result. Those who never pray will never know what God’s plan is concerning them...

The true disciple of Christ is obedient, just as the Master is obedient to the Father. Whoever loves me follows my commandments; the disciple is the one who hears the word and puts it into practice.  To remain faithful to the message of the Master means therefore to obey the directives of this message.

The truth leads to freedom, freedom leads to the truth
Mastering oneself is the greatest of empires...
How can anyone say that he is free if he is governed by his own desires? Socrates
I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. (Jn. 14:6)

Before we can submit to a project drawn by God and be a real contributor in the world; before we can give, heart and soul, to this project in which we give ourselves to the service of a cause, we need to be in full possession of ourselves. No one can give what he doesn't have, thus if we don’t possess ourselves we cannot make ourselves a gift to others.

So that we can be in charge we need to submit to the conflicting forces within us, which do not respond to our reason; we have to become masters of ourselves, winning the civil war that every man has within him.

Upon rebuking a teenager we often hear him say: “I can do whatever I want with my life"; many times those who say this are precisely the ones who have less power to do what they really should want with their lives. There is no freedom for... without the freedom from...We are not free to do whatever we want if we do not possess our innermost selves; or, if we are not free from vices, bad habits, manias and all sort of obsessive, compulsive, eccentric behaviours which have more power to govern our day-to-day lives than our intellect does; these eccentricities being all together quite capable at each moment of deciding what we do.

A man can allow a bad habit to have dominion over him, to the point that he cannot set himself free.  Similarly, he can let a desire to fully overwhelm and control him, so that he has no strength to get away from it. Completely enslaved by self-indulgence, this person can become schizophrenic, loving and hating his bad habits both at the same time. The one who has been caught in this cobweb of addiction, loses completely the power to do what he wants and what he wishes. As Jesus said, no one who sins can say that he is free.

Freedom is for the soul what bread is for the body. But if freedom is a human value, then like all other values, it is not something that we are born with but rather something that we acquire through effort, blood, sweat, and tears but most of all by God’s grace.

A life in Present Perfect
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, (...) it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. (...) For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  (Rom. 7:15-19)

In order for us to possess ourselves we need to know ourselves. In grammatical terms, it is an illusion to think that our lives run in the Simple Present, when 90% of our behaviour is influenced by our past. In reality, the tense of the verb which we live in is more like the Present Perfect which refers to an action that started in the past but still continues into the present.

We live in a present that is often invaded by the unresolved issues of our past. Most of the time, we are not even aware of this past which continues to reappear in our everyday life, and oblivious to our will, it can be triggered by any present event or circumstance. It is as if we were walking through a minefield with the risk of stepping on a bomb at any moment. When we live most of our lives unaware in the present perfect tense, our behavior would seem to be on some sort of autopilot mode, like an aeroplane at cruising altitude.

Know yourself -- The Socratic maxim sounds here in all its exuberance. I can only aspire to be free, to possess myself, in order to give myself up to a cause if I know myself. Knowledge means power; therefore if I know myself then I have power over myself. What I know of myself this I can control because knowledge also implies control; what I don't know of myself controls me and what is alien to my desire makes me behave as if I am on cruise control.

Our truth, our identity, has a historical dimension, it is something that has to be built. For this reason, in the same way that trees need to grow downwards by their roots in order to grow upwards, we also, in order to grow as people, need first to visit our past.

Like the tree that extends its roots into the depth of the soil to find nutrients and to balance its height, we too need to extend our knowledge, to the beginning of our lives, in order to understand completely how we became who we are, and so to be able to become what God calls us to be.

After we take control of our past, and become aware of everything that was good and bad that we did or happened to us, we must escape the temptation to deny whatever they may be and assume the responsibility of our history.

...You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Because we know the truth of our past, and we take responsibility for it, we now have the power to control its influence on our present. This time, no longer walking in a minefield nor led through life as if we were on autopilot, we are free because our behaviour is now decided directly by our reason. In this way we can now possess our time and energy and commit them to a cause of our choice.

                                    Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC