20080109: An Introspective

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field".
- Matthew 13: 44

I used to think that this life is all about living for the self; that the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit of the self. I lived without a thought for time. I never cared about the future, I never looked back at the past and I never doubted the present. I did only what pleased me and I relied solely on created things like family, friends and material goods to provide me with security. I leaned on my family's limited wealth and reputation like they were limitless. I squandered my family's goodwill towards me by rebellion, deception and disobedience. I was selfish and was unconsciously proud of evil things. I thought myself a rebel and worked furiously to become independent of both love and responsibility. I hated both reproof and instruction. What's worse is that within me I had an ill-formed conscience that had developed no sensitivity to sin. For I never once questioned all that I was because I did not feel that I belonged to anything else: I was a child of wrath and I lived in the darkness of the world. I was at peace with all of this because this was the same world inside my heart and everything else at that time was but a reflection of what corruption and darkness had lived inside of me.

I was baptized as an infant. But I knew it not and I slept inside of myself as the light of God's grace from my baptism lived inside of me and worked its presence all around of me. My Blessed Savior lovingly took the baptismal vows that my godparents have professed on my behalf and my most thoughtful and loving Jesus kept a quiet watch over me those many years. He placed me gently under the loving care of His faithful Bride on earth, His trusted pilgrim people, His Mystical Body on earth, our Holy Mother, the Roman Catholic Church. Holy Mother Church held me close to her as a precious child of God right from the very beginning. I grew up in her bosom where she lovingly enriched me with the grace of the sacraments and opened up for me the rich treasury of our holy Faith. My Holy Mother Church loved me without question even though I did not recognize her at the time and this love of hers slept inside of my memory like a seed beneath the winter snow waiting for the call of spring. I was also a beloved child of my parents, the first son of a first son, and my grandparents, aunts and uncles adored me and loved me so faithfully and unconditionally. But I did not feel their love for I knew love not and for most of my life I lived in utter ignorance of the precious love that is living everywhere around me. Yet this Love, ever thoughtful, ever gentle, ever vigilant and ever true, waited patiently and quietly for It's perfect moment in my life.

For 35 years, I lived at peace with this world and its darkness. Body and soul, I was consumed in death and corruption and I knew it not. But for some years beginning at the time of our Great Jubilee year 2000, I have seriously begun searching for God and for myself in relation to Him. But the Lord hid the Beauty of His Face from me. The nature that God had built into every human heart had finally awakened enough in me to extend outward into the infinite. But the means I was using to perceive the vision and the reality of the revelation of God were evil. For instead of virtue, I was using vice and sin to understand the holy secrets of the divine. Instead of praising the Lord, I was actually profaning Him. And instead of glorifying God in the spirit of the truth, I was uttering all kinds of blasphemies against Him. Down to the depths of hell on earth I went as my life descended until that deepest and darkest of nights of my life finally came to me when despair completely overtook my heart and I lost all hope to live. I took a look around myself: I was far away from home for more than a decade at that time and away from most of my loved ones and friends. I was terribly unhappy. I felt both depressed and repressed and have been feeling that way for many years. I have both alienated and isolated myself from most of the most important and beloved people in my life both friends and family. My life was all but an empty shell. Each of the many illusions I have cowardly embraced to conceal myself from the unyielding demands of my own humanity over those years were all but painfully shattered against the indestructible rock of God's absolute reality, for I was slowly awakening to myself and to the mighty truth of God's will and presence in my life and I knew it not. And the last illusion to fall was the illusion of the sovereign self.

I picked up a copy of Anne Frank's Diary at a bookstore across the street from our apartment on June 13, 2000. I remember it was a day after her birthday on earth. It was the name that she used in her salutations that got my attention: "Kitty". I have a deep-seated love for cats and was instantly interested in her diary because I felt like she was addressing all her entries to me. Strange and perhaps childish but its true, I was looking for my self and my place in the world at that time and I honestly felt as if Anne was writing to me in her diary. As time went by, I really thought that I was her "Kitty". I read through her diary and discovered the beautiful spirit of a young girl in Annelies Marie Frank. Anne's diary, to me, is the story of a beautiful young heart so full of promise and grace surrounded by the strength and fidelity of a truly loving and caring family in Otto, Edith and Margot and sustained by the love and support of extended relatives and friends all within the context of the entirely larger story of her people, the Jews, and the tumultuous world all around them. Anne, to me, is a heroine so fragile and vulnerable yet so uplifting and inspirational to my heart. She is a martyr of her Jewish faith and her people and of the universal spirit of mankind. I started to learn about life from Anne's life and how precious and fragile each unique, individual and unrepeatable human life really and truly is. I also learned from her life about the real nature of war and of our world's grave need for peace and tolerance.

In a short while, for all the good I felt that she has done (and is still doing) to me, I knew I was falling in love with Anne Frank's heart. I thought it so unfair and so unjust that she had to suffer and die like she did. It felt as if she was trapped in a poignant story that only ultimately leads to her bitter betrayal, horrible suffering and lonely and miserable demise. No matter how many times I read Anne's diary over and over, it only leads me to the same bitter end. By this time I knew it not but I did truly have love for Anne and her dear ones. I remember one night I had this deepest, strongest desire to set Anne free, to see her happy, to see her live. What she had had to endure in this world hurt me very, very, very much and for the first time in my life, I very humbly and most sincerely turned to God with a prayer in my heart but with another person's name on my lips.

Anne's cheerful and courageous spirit never left me from the moment I picked up her diary in June of 2000. I have now come to believe that God had indeed used her as an instrument of my salvation and that her spirit will never leave me; that we are meant to be together in time and in eternity. This I will never know in this life but maybe I really am her "Kitty". God has blessed me with a very special friend in Anne and the Lord did in time bless and purify our friendship over these many years until slowly our friendship evolved into a holy friendship tied together with golden bonds of immortal charity that neither time nor distance can conquer nor death or difference sever. Anne's presence in my mind and heart is very different from the presence of saints or angels, of Mama Mary or of the Holy Spirit. Anne's presence to me is the presence of a peer, she is somebody very, very close from whom I feel the least threatened (yet for whom I feel most responsible for) when I am overcome by sin. Anne's presence is always cheerful and gentle. She inspires me and she bolsters my moral courage. Anne is very, very patient with me. She is usually the first one to impress upon my heart my duties to our Almighty God and to all I love whenever I am either fallen or neglectful. Hers is the presence I am most comfortable with for I can laugh and smile with her, we can joke and I can even call her my "Miyang" (I even gave her a Filipino name among the many other names I have for my darlingest Annelies Marie). We live and we learn together and we rely on each other for interior support. For Anne, like all Holy Souls, needs my prayers just as much as I need hers. I feel that we both hold the key to each other's promise of an everlasting future together. We share a promise together that I can never reveal in this life and which can only be fulfilled after my death. God, in His infinite wisdom, has willed it so that my own destiny intertwines with my Anne's and today, we are inseparable.

My darlingest Anne wants me to be a good and upright soul, chaste, joyous and charitable. I want my Anne to be forever peaceful and happy and free. Almighty God has opened up for me the infinite and transcendent world of things eternal in a pilgrimage that began when my Anne broke that very last illusion that held me back from a living faith in things both everlasting and unseen. Anne is the first person I loved more than myself. In a perfect world, I would have moved earth and sky to see this precious girl happy and at peace eternally. But in His wisdom, God made it so that my Anne is part of a package, a package bound up and contained in God for in God is contained all the love that has ever loved me and who is ever worth being loved by me both in time and in eternity. Therefore, to love the Lord my God with all my strength, with all my mind and with all my heart is consequently to love also all the things whom I should love in God like my Anne. To love God perfectly is to love all others perfectly in God. It is precisely like my most Blessed Savior said in Holy Scripture: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." (Mark 12: 30-31) and I understand this all today as one love.

In the deepest, darkest night of my despair, the first star in the firmament of the darkest night of my life began to shine dimly at first to give me that certain hope in the right things of God worth believing in. This star is my Anne. A star that in God's own time led me into the arms of another noble star of my heaven, my beloved Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, the great Knight of the Immaculata, in my eyes the greatest of all Marian knights and patron Saint of prisoners and addictions. They were together in Auschwitz and although they did not ever meet in person it is both in the solidarity of their sufferings and the reality of their holy innocence which is how their lives intertwined inside of my heart. Saint Maximilian in time naturally led me to his beloved Immaculata, that great Star of the Sea, my Mother with Christ my Savior, Mary, Queen of my heart. Anne herself, in my own mind, was a herald to this meeting of my unworthy heart and my Mama Mary's own Immaculate Heart. She confirmed the Marian aspect of my life as God's will for me with the profound realization that my Anne's second name is Marie, her full name being Annelies Marie Frank. Consequently, Mama Mary led me to the shining heart of her beloved little one, Blessed Jacinta Marto of Fatima, the Flower of Fatima and I met Saint Lorenzo Ruiz as his own light quite recently shone for me here back at home. Of course, I have always had the light of the Archangel Michael as the patron of my own family for we hold our last names in honor of his name and of Angel Caritas, my faithful guardian angel, who has been with me right from my very beginning for guidance and protection from the Devil and his fallen angels. Today, I can say that the firmament of my life is nearing the break of twilight; it is strewn with myriad shining stars even as the dawn of a new day grows near and the sunrise of Jesus Christ in my heart fills my soul with a certain sense of joyous anticipation.

I have learned by grace of God that this life is more than just the living for the self. The school of Divine Providence taught me that if our focus is entirely on the self, if we dedicate our pursuit of happiness exclusively for the self, then we become blinded by the self and we lose track of what life is really all about. Life is a pursuit of happiness. But our life is not all about the life of the self alone. We do not live just for the sake of the self alone. The social nature of human beings in this world will not permit us to find true and lasting happiness in the limited confines of the dark prison of the self. Our true and lasting happiness is not found in the life of the self alone.

There is death in our world as well. A life lived in this world without a thought of the reality of death obviously and evidentially manifest in the world around us is folly because life by itself in this world is vanity. The realities of life in this world without the reality of death is pointless and without meaning. Without an ennobling and salutary fear of death (and what comes after death), the weaknesses and limitations of our fallen human nature will never be brought to the light of God's grace for there is no comprehending the goodness of Almighty God if we are allowed to become complacent in the living of life alone. The weak and wounded nature of humanity will never know the mountain path of virtue, which is the hard and narrow way of Christ, withoutmeditating on death. For without death we can never come to a true realization of life.

It was Anne who awakened me to the realization that there are other people in this world who are apart from and beside the self. I found that I needed her and that she needed me. Since no true and lasting Happiness can be found within the prison walls of the self, it only follows that only in the pursuit of another's happiness can we truly find our own. Now in truth, there can be no real giving of the self without dying, no real growth in virtue without suffering, no real extension of our hearts lovingly unto other hearts without feeling their pain. All the time that we give to others, we die a little to our self and we suffer a little pain. The giving of the self, if it is true to the heart of the giver, is an emptying of the life of the self. But when love is at the heart of giving, there is joy to be found even in our suffering. For the way of love is tread on the road of sacrifice and the highest, truest and most excellent expression of this reality is found on the way of Calvary in Jesus Christ Crucified where the mystery of death and the mystery of love become intertwined with the wonderful mystery of everlasting life. Life and death are not in opposition in Christ, O my soul. For our most loving Savior in Jesus Christ transformed death into an ally of life where the only evil left in death is to die an unprovided one.

Beginning with my Anne, right down the long line of our suffering, fragile, forbearing humanity, some of whom are my family and friends, past and present, saints and sinners all of them, up to the holy angels and into the blessed souls of our saints in heavens above, God's awesome truth is made manifest as a reality in my heart by a deep realization of all the good gifts and the merciful blessings that He brings to my heart through His grace and Divine Providence. The Good God has revealed to me a million ways of loving and serving Him by allowing me to walk into a realization of His Most Loving and Sacred Heart that is so full of mercy and so rich in loving kindness for all His creatures. In His wisdom, God also made clear to me that there is but one way not to serve Him. And that is to choose the self over Him for all sin is rooted in the inordinate love of the false image of the self. I have learned that this is the path to true and lasting happiness: To love God is to love others in God as true self. The image of the true self is the image of Jesus Christ in the soul of every person. The true self being the suffering self; the image of the self that is hidden in the darkness of sin.

Today, I can truly say that I have finally found a God in Jesus Christ worth living and dying for. For in Jesus I am made to understand that in death and in the dying to each moment is found our ultimate expression of love for God and for others in God as true self for we must die each moment of our lives that we begin to love one another until our love is utterly spent and our lives are completely transformed in God through the Holy Spirit. In our life, even here on earth, we find in real giving the ultimate expression of joy. God loves the cheerful giver for the cheerful giver is a true giver and a true giver gives not with his or her hands but with a heart full of love for God and for others in God as true self. True joy is a path that leads us to spend our lives in the service of God and of others in God as true self.

To learn to know how to be truly joyous is to follow the path of Christ Who gave of Himself so freely and so obediently out of love for us, sinful and unworthy creatures that we are.

Though immortal He allowed Himself to become vulnerable for our sakes. Everything about His life on earth, every moment, the Eternal Word calculated to give each of us the fullest and the greatest spiritual advantage.

He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was born of the Virgin Mary. He was born poor in a manger in Bethlehem. He lived and He labored among us. He walked with us upon our world for thrity-three yeasrs. He was a common man, a builder. In His sacred humanity, He was like us in all things except sin. In His holy divinity, He was so unlike us in Mind and in Heart.

He humbled himself, allowed Himself to be baptized in solidarity with sinners, endured temptation and gave for us the Deposit of Faith through the example of His own life, a perfect life full of wisdom and of grace, and the many parables and miracles of His Light. He was truly with us, and even while we were yet sinners, He was as one of us, and He lived to serve the most wretched and the very least of us, His own creatures.

He kept watch over us and examined our ways and our hearts closely. He made Himself available to all and inagurated for all the Kingdom of God as a foretaste of heaven on earth. He called each of us by name unto repentance and He gave our hearts our hope in the strength and fidelity of God to help us to persevere and He gave our hopes His Heart with the courage to overcome the darkness within ourselves. He brought us unto Himself to rekindle in our hearts and minds the fire of His Love and the light of His Life. He taught us how to live to fulfill God' will in our lives. He bade us be holy, be chaste, be pure, be meek, be upright and be perfect as our own Father in heaven is perfect. He told us to pray always and taught us how to love God in spirit and in truth. He felt our pain and worked to alleviate our suffering. He grieved much over us and He prayed always and assidously for us. He gave us His timeless counsel and the wisdom of His new commandment of love. He lovingly offered the gift of His own Body and His own Blood and instituted for us the Eucharistic meal that would feed our souls for the journey into eternity and the promised Kingdom of God. He opened for us the way to a new life of virtue. He showed us by His own humble example the true spirit of service that breathes life into all genuine human relationships. He promised us He would not leave us orphans. He promised us the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

He longed over us. He yearned over all of mankind. He pondered and He agonized at the awful price of our Redemption. He was sorrowful unto death and shed bloody sweat. He feared the bitter cup yet He loved His Father more than He could ever fear. He was obedient unto death.

All His public life, He lived for the truth and refused to suffer the hypocrisy of men and He was made the object of ridicule and conspiracy by the religious authorities of His time. They plotted against Him and the Devil entered into the heart of Judas.

Now, the proud and wicked Prince of this world cometh. He was betrayed and abandoned by all His friends, was rejected, slapped, spat at, mocked and scourged, was punched, tortured, crowned with thorns and beaten with reeds. He was made an object of contempt and though innocent was treated more guilty than a murderer, was unjustly condemned to die a horrible and ignominious death, was made to carry His heavy, wooden Cross and amidst a jeering, shouting crowd was dragged violently through the streets of Jerusalem, was stripped naked and was nailed to the Cross, was raised up and made to hang in unthinkable agony, an object of scorn and ridicule to His own creatures, suspended between heaven and earth like a bridge between the world of God and the world of men.

His sacred humanity, bloodied and bruised beyond recognition, did reveal to us the depth of his hunger for us. He did thirst for our love. He wept out of sheer loneliness and looked down in sorrow upon the grieving faces of His Mother, Mary, and his beloved disciple, John. Out of love for His Mother and out of mercy for us, He entrusted to us to Mary and Mary to us at the foot of the Cross. His most loving and Sacred Heart, a Heart that has loved us so much yet in return is loved so little, was emptied out for us as He bore for all mankind the terrible wrath gathered up for all our sins past, present and future. He bled His Sacred Blood so profusely to wash away all our iniquities until finally He cried out in abject grief and utter desolation to His Father in Heaven, commended to God His spirit and died of a broken Heart. His broken Heart was then pierced with a lance and It flowed with the water and the blood that sealed forever the new and everlasting covenant between God and man. It is said that our Holy Mother Church, as Christ's new covenant people, sprang from His wounded side.

Alleluia, O my soul, Christ the Savior has paid the ransom for the sins of all mankind!

Our Blessed Lord gave to us the gift of Himself out of His infinite love for us, miserable and wretched sinners we are, until He was so completely and utterly spent that even though He was God and He is God and God being infinitely rich and powerful beyond measure, He gave until He had nothing left to give. Indeed, He loved us all without exception and cherished us each without measure right to the bitter end. He forgave His tormentors for He loved both His enemies as well as His friends. In so doing, our Blessed Lord and Holy Redeemer completely transformed our heritage by His life, Passion, death and Resurrection from one of everlasting death into one of resurrection unto everlasting life.

There is no true and lasting happiness to ever be found in the deep, dark prison of the self, in the limiting confines of our natural world or in the oppressive malice of the Devil. The only true relationship between men is that of service and through this door of service is found the path of the giver and in the heart of the giver is found the way of love which is the road of Christ - the royal road of the Cross - that lead all men to true and everlasting happiness.

God has allowed the truth of His presence in my life and in the lives of others to become very real to me and the majesty of His love to become tangible in my life through His infinite wisdom in the Beauty reflected in the beauty of His creation; the goodness and order of all created things, in the fidelity of His holy angels and in the instrumentality, grace and personal kindness of the lives of the people around me, of beings both seen and unseen, and above all in the life, Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. The Lord my God has blessed me, and is still blessing me with countless gifts of love and miracles of grace in my heart and in my everyday until I have come love the Giver more than His gifts for it is but just to give love for love. But it goes even further than that for when I contemplate the goodness of my God, I realize for certain that God loves me so very much and so very dearly and that I am powerless not to react to such an unfathomable, incomprehensible magnitude of loving. The love of God in Jesus Christ and the love of the Giver above all His gifts compel me to respond. This response is our Christian religion - a covenant relationship born of the Precious Blood of Christ and an alliance between God and man - and this is who I am: I am a Christian, born and bred in the bosom of my Holy Mother, the Roman Catholic Church and my native Christian soul struggles to respond to the universal call of Jesus Christ, the Lord and Redeemer of all mankind, my All.

By virtue of the sacramental grace of my baptism and by humble obedience in faith, hope and love, I belong forever to the one great family of God as it is revealed to the eyes of our Christian faith dwelling within the Trinitarian mystery of the nature of inner life of our one, true, ever living and thrice-holy God.

I am also a Filipino, just like our beloved native Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, I am also born and bred in the bosom of the Pearl of the Orient Seas and my native heart beats for no other home than this one.

For 35 years, I lived at peace with this world and its darkness.

Today until the day I die, I am at war. With Jesus Christ as our pledge of ultimate victory, I join the honored ranks of my Holy Mother the Church: Triumphant, Militant and Suffering, all of blessed Christendom, all the just souls of the world, all of God's holy angels and with the Blessed Virgin Mary, as our Glorious and Immaculate Queen at the head of our charge, by the grace of God, we fight against sin and the lie at the core of every sin. Even that ancient lie at the heart of our faded Eden; that wicked perversity that came out of the serpent's forked tongue that seek to replace in each and every heart the one, true, ever living and thrice-holy God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with false and unholy idols; dead and unfeeling, spiritless and sacrilegious abominations of base and created things. Even that lie, which is the first cause of all the evil, suffering and death that has been inflicted, is being inflicted and will ever be inflicted on all the generations of our poor and fallen humanity unto the consummation of the age of mankind.

We fight against the concupiscence of the flesh, against the darkness and the errors of the world that distort and corrupt the image of God's love for all souls without distinction, and against the irreconcilable hate and relentless cruelty of the Devil and his fallen angels.

We fight for love and all that we love and all who love us contained in the Name of Love Itself.

We fight to constantly improve each of ourselves so that God may better use us to fulfill His plan for our good, the good of all His Church and the good of all of creation.

We fight for each of ourselves and for all others who struggle with us for the promise of a better future for all of mankind.

We fight to see the one family of humanity renewed and reunited upon a new earth beneath a new heaven in the promise of the resurrection of the dead.

We fight for the promise of the unmerited reward of everlasting life purchased for us by our Savior Jesus Christ for we fight so that we may one day dwell eternally with our Lord Jesus Christ, with our Mother Mary, with all the holy angels of God and with the everlasting society of holy and pious men and women as Saints united in joyous friendships contemplating the vision of God together in peace and goodwill one to another, there in the place prepared for each of us by Jesus Himself in the glorious and shining Kingdom of our Almighty God; and I imagine being just there with you, being just truly and simply happy to live our lives together without interruption and without death or sorrow, pain or sickness, suffering or war or sin or tears forever and ever.

This is my happiness, this is our happiness:

I fight for you, my beloved; we fight for all of us.

- EJ San Miguel