WORD ALIVE
Some time ago I celebrated the culminating mass of a two-day Life in the Spirit Seminar (LSS) of the Loved Flock charismatic community at the DPWH chapel, Port Area in Manila.
What I considered remarkable was that the organizers were lay people and professionals who took time out to reach out to youngsters and adults from around the area who were in need of spiritual renewal.
The organizers did not only pray but shared their three Ts – time, treasure, talent.
They had taken seriously the call of Christ to go out to teach and provide spiritual healing as enunciated in the gospel of this 15th Sunday: “Jesus summoned the twelve and began sending them out” (Mk 6,7).
Today, some have still the idea that the call of Christ to evangelize addressed only to the apostles and their successors: bishops, priests, missionaries, and other religious. That’s no longer true.
The Vatican II Decree on Laity puts it clearly: “Incorporated into Christ's Mystical Body through baptism and strengthened by the power of the Holy Spirit through confirmation, the laity are assigned to the apostolate by the Lord himself" (3).
So, whether you are a lawyer, clerk, doctor, politician, executive, teacher, or an ordinary worker, you are sent out to share in the apostolic work of the Church.
That’s why there are parish pastoral council, various parish organizations and charismatic and renewal communities like Couples for Christ, Marriage Encounter, Lord’s Flock, El Shaddai, and many others.
There’s another way of evangelizing or teaching the Christian faith. Pope John Paul in his encyclical “Redemptoris Missio” wrote that the “most effective and irreplaceable” way of evangelizing is witnessing by Christian living and edifying example.
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A Hindu man who lay dying as the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta sought to comfort him. “What is this?” the man asked, grasping the crucifix that hung from her neck.
“That’s a symbol that reminds me of my God,” she replied. “Mother Teresa, then your God is also my God now!” the Hindu exclaimed as he breathed his last.
Mother Teresa, now a saint, never preached nor pontificated about love and poverty. It’s her serene action that endeared the Christian faith to the Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Protestants
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Ask yourself: What apostolic work are you doing for your church? To paraphrase the late US Pres. John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your Church can do for you; rather ask what you can do for your Church.”
Aside from going to Church and receiving the sacraments, do you also do acts of charity, especially in times of financial crisis?
In everyday life, do people see honesty in your dealings and transactions, justice in treating your workers and helpers, forgiveness when others wrong us?
When Jesus will return in the world’s reckoning, he will judge us on the basis of the good we have done or on the evil.
The spiritual writer John Dunne puts it, thus: “I shall pass this way but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show, let me do it now. Let me not neglect nor defer it for I shall not pass this way again.”
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Humor to ponder. Three friends met in a class reunion and were engaged in a spirited conversation. “In our town,” said the first, “people call me ‘Monsignor’ because I am a part-time lay minister.”
The second said: "Well, I’m now a businessman but I'm an active charismatic elder. I give spiritual talks so everybody calls me ‘Cardinal’.”
The third classmate, who was quietly listening, had his turn to speak: “Well, I’m a sales representative. I help in church as collector at Mass. Many call me ‘God.’”
“What, God? How come!” his puzzled friends reacted. The sales representative said, “You see, when I knock at the door of my customers, and they see me with my products, they exclaim, ‘My God, my God, you again!’”
There are more and more lay people who are active in various church apostolates. But not in the way those three friends did their own apostolates.
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