Sunday, March 2, 2014

Divine Providence



8th Sunday in Ordinary Time
March 2, 2014
Matthew 6:24 – 34

“Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they (Mat 6:26)?”

Jesus tells us that we must not be worried about our lives, about what we are going to eat and about our bodies and their clothes. Life is more than all of these because God holds us precious and dear. However, the reality seems to prove otherwise. Every day, thousand defenseless babies are aborted, enormous number of children and young women fall victims of human trafficking and prostitution, and millions suffer in conflict-torn areas. Tablet, the International Catholic weekly on June 8, 2013 reported that 2 million children die out of hunger every year. In Metro Manila, poorest families living in modified pushcarts is quite familiar sight. Recently, national newspapers trumpet that more than 12 million Filipinos are technically jobless (roughly around 13% of the population).
Looking at this staggering numbers, it seems that God has failed to fulfill His promises. Why does God allow this utter suffering afflicting humanity? Yet, our God is not a god of statistics but the God of the living. Jesus is keeping His promises to us in amazing yet most unlikely ways. Allow me to share the story of Nanay Maria (not her real name). She is just living at Tatalon neighborhood, one of the poorest areas in Quezon City, more or less 200 meters away from my cozy room at Dominican Studentate! She was poor mother staying at a extremely tiny house together with her husband, three children and a lot of grandchildren! Sometimes, they have something to fill their stomach, but often they have only each other. Yet, despite her utter poverty, God’s loving providence manifests through her.
There was a Muslim living next to her house. He got no job for months and had no money. Thus, he could not pay his water and electric bills. Eventually, these resources were cut from him. To fill his stomach, he sold everything in the house. Finally he came to the house of Nanay and asked her to buy his very old bag for 100 pesos. Nanay refused to buy, but then she gave him some kilos of rice (though the rice in her house was very limited) and two buckets of water to take a bath because he was very smelly! A friend asked her, “Why are you so good with this Muslim?” “I don’t care if he is a Muslim or a Catholic. I only know that he is my neighbor, and Jesus teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves.” God fulfills His promises!
Allow me also to share the life of Sr. Aziza of Comboni Missionary in the Holy Land. She spends a lot of her days in the refuge centers in the West Bank to take care of mostly African asylum seekers. As a nurse and a midwife, her skills are invaluable, but she goes beyond her professional talents. She treats also the deep psychological wounds of the people by being present and listening to their horrifying stories. Jotting down also their stories, she has collected testimonies from more than 1,300 Africans who escaped from torture camps in the Sinai Desert. The testimonies record how refugees found themselves at the mercy of smugglers in the lawless Sinai territory close to the Israeli border. Some spoke of being held to ransom, sometimes for years, and of being chained, starved, raped and otherwise tortured in attempts to extort money from their relatives at home in different parts of Africa. Others said they had been trafficked on to other countries for lives of domestic slavery or prostitution. Sr. Aziza’s work formed the centerpiece of a research project that exposed for the first time the scale of suffering endured by refugees in the Sinai camps. Without Sr. Aziza, the world would have remained at its slumber to this monstrous work of the Devil. God once again fulfills His promise.
Br. Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP 

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