The morning of the Thanksgiving Mass for the Canonization of San Pedro Calungsod last week, while getting ready to go to the SRP for the celebrations, I chanced upon my editor Quennie Bronce’s Facebook status about a conversation she had with her son where he asks her how one becomes a saint, because he ‘wants to help the needy.’ The day before, in his sermon, Archbishop Palma said we are all called to be saints.
San Pedro—being exceptionally young when his life was ‘nipped in the bud,’ and having been declared a saint at a time when Filipinos are among the top Facebook users in the world—is truly a saint for our times—he appeals to the youth of this cyber age probably more than any other saint in the Roman Church.
But with the daily grind made even more complex by our self-imposed online obligations, how does one respond to the call of sainthood? I’m not sure exactly, besides, of all people I think I should be the last giving advice or tips on the topic (LOL).
With very limited opportunities for martyrdom (dying for one’s faith through being burnt at the stake, impalement, beheading, et. al.) in the 21st century—save probably for when you’re in African, or those Pacific Islands or parts of the Amazon with cannibals, or places in the Middle East where extremists rule—how can one be like Pedro was?
I have some proposals, unsolicited advice, although I bet some of you would most certainly disagree:
Abandon worldly wisdom and embrace your faith even when one sees no rhyme or reason to back it up. After all, such is the very nature and essence of faith—believing without seeing, embracing without question, loving without any condition.
When you say you are a Catholic, mean it. Don’t be a Catholic only when you agree with the Church’s teachings, or whenever it’s convenient. To be a Catholic Christian is to have faith and belief in God; to believe in God is to believe in a truth that transcends. Transcendent truth is an unchanging truth despite the wisdom of the time, in spite of personal opinion. For instance, you can choose to argue and believe that you will never age and will live forever; but the transcendent truth in this is, no matter how healthy you live and inject botox on your face, you will ultimately age and die. That truth transcends the truth you believe in your heart.
“His ways are not our ways.” This sums up the answer to most of our confusions. Our world now teaches the value of individualism, of the importance of our rights, of fighting for our freedom, the self is the center of it all; we are ‘god seeds,’ as the New Age proponent Oprah Winfrey would put it. While these worldly values may be good (especially the concept of rights and social justice), the subliminal effect on our Christian selves is adverse. We begin to question authority and transcendent truth, we focus on ourselves, our wants, needs, and our opinion, more than anything. Materialism and mass media keep our focus on earthly desires, and take our sights away from His Kingdom, the world we cannot see.
Now, our actions, convictions, policies, and interventions are mainly focused on protecting, promoting and perpetuating our corporeal or temporal pursuits, forgetting that our finite journey is only temporary, as we venture into the great infinite.
Alas, we have allowed this world and its limitations to define our spirit. Perhaps defiance, as a human expression, is truly in our nature. It is spurred and exemplified by the defiance, whether actual or metaphorical, at the Garden of Eden, where our proverbial forebears partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (…to be continued next Saturday)
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