Seduced by a dance

Today's Gospel narrating the circumstances of John the Baptist's death reminds us of a truth all of us share. Without a strong center, it is easy to be seduced: by power, by beauty, by money, by short-term success, by practicality and convenience.
Herodias' daughter's dance played to the basest instincts of Herod - human respect, the desire to show-off one's power.
Without a firm and more stable center, it is easy to vacillate and to be seduced even by a dance.
Every day we are faced with decisions to make. Whatever our choice may be, they show what we hold dear in our life.
But there are bigger moments when our decision is a matter of life or death. What or who is the center that will eventually decide the life and death of our soul?

To preach and to heal

Jesus sends His disciples two by two, to preach and to heal. Jesus sends them out with the barest of the essentials. But a part of the essential is being sent in the company of someone, that is, the community dimension. Community is support in our mission. Community is also a message that we bring. The Good News is for all, and it unites us all in God's family.

It's all grace

Transformation or conversion begins, proceeds, is sustained and finds its fulfillment in God.
It doesn't start with having everything in my life totally in place.
It proceeds by letting grace, God's grace, fill my life and find a home in me.
It is sustained by the certainty that God loves me as I am, with still the many aspects of my life not in place.
Its fulfillment is not the self-assurance that "I made it". No, its fulfillment is being in the heart of God.
For, indeed, everything is grace.

Look for the extraordinary

Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. This is what being childlike means. This is our gateway to heaven, for heaven is not an assembly of perfect people.
What is heaven like? I don't have any phrase to describe it perfectly. But come to think of it, even Jesus used images to explain heaven. After all, our thinking is very much limited and conditioned by what our senses can grasp.

We love God because God first loved us

This is not like the-chicken-and-the-egg thing. We do, can only love God because God loved us first, that is, unconditionally. There is nothing we can do that can diminish God's love for us and nothing we can do to increase it. What God gives us is His love that is uniquely for us.
When we correspond to God's love, His love doesn't increase, but we increase our capacity to receive it and to be filled by it.

The power of ONE

I like calendars where you can turn the page every month. There is something sort of a ritual as I turn one page to another and see the number one. It means a new beginning, a possibility to change, to get out of a rut. It is like God telling me "hey, enough with the self-pity and self-recrimination, see, I am making something new. I am renewing you".

The God of life

Today's Gospel reading is on the Magnificat. Mary remembers and gives praise for the presence of God not only in her life but in the life of her people. This Magnificat led to the "Pietà". God is not only the God of good times. God is the God of life, and it includes the failures, the suffering, the apparent defeat of reason and goodness. In your courage, in your steadfastness, in your magnanimity in these times, God is present. And that is the meaning of Christmas. God-became-flesh, and in doing so there is no one and nothing excluded from God's embrace.
A very merry Christmas to all.
Let us bring back Christ to Christmas.