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Sunday, September 05, 2004

Counting One's Costs

It was something Fr AJ said in his homily today as I was celebrating the 6.00 p.m. evening Mass. Count the costs, are we Christ's disciples?, if we can't be willing to sacrifice oneself for the faith that we profess to; we are no disciples of Christ. Hard statements, yet nothing new for it came from the gospel reading of this Sunday.

As I was listening to the homily, I felt as if a great weight was imposed upon my shoulders. Never felt this since my last discerning 30-day retreat in Chiangmai. Then, it was because I was meditating on the passion of Christ as part of the Ignatian spiritual exercise of the 3rd week. I was feeling very burdened and was seeing things like in a 'black and white movie'. I felt I was carrying the weight of the cross that Jesus himself carried to Calvary. The feeling I felt during Mass this evening at this juncture was exactly like that: burdened, wearisome and perhaps even afraid.

It was as though I was feeling the sentiments of our people at that moment in time when they realised that it wasn't going to be easy to count the costs and to 'sacrifice'. Have we allowed ourselves to be tied down to our complacency and relative comforts, that we find it frightening to begin to be detached from all these, even for a while?...

We need to plumb the depths of Eph 1: 3ff to see why we can have the necessary convictions to see us sufficiently abled to plow through the adversities of life and engage positively to transform the world!

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