Daily Reflections- August 1, 2012

ON ACCOUNT OF God’S WORD

 

I can’t blame Jeremiah for complaining. Everything was thrown at him for speaking out in God’s name. He got condemned for doing what he did not want to do in the first place. Young, inexperienced and unschooled about the ways of the world, he was sent right smack into the fray, to deliver his brand of “prophetic criticizing” and “prophetic energizing.”

I can identify with Jeremiah — been there, done that. I was also young when I tried to organize people against a growing drug menace. I was in the thick of my own version of prophetic criticizing. And just like Jeremiah, I began to feel the heat especially when my prophetic criticizing was translating into prophetic energizing as far as the people were concerned.

I began to realize that words were cheap and human life was even cheaper. I didn’t want to be a mere statistic, felled by a single blow, a possible but eerily probable mute witness to boundless greed and to man’s inhumanity to fellow man. Last year’s brave revelations of a woman who was in the thick of the fight against corruption in high places involving men in uniform reminded me of Jeremiah, of myself, and of the many whose courage did not only go unrewarded but even silenced forever.

My thoughts today go to Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko of Poland. Authorities in his native Poland could not bear his popularity and his effectiveness as a preacher. He was beaten and murdered in 1984, his body dumped in a water reservoir. He was beatified two years ago, in June 2010, with his centenarian mother in attendance.

But what the martyrs and saints had that I didn’t was exactly what Jeremiah also had. Jeremiah devoured God’s Word. Blessed Father Jerzy lived — and died — on the basis of that Word. They all suffered trying to uphold the Word of God. But God is a God of justice. Jeremiah and Jerzy discovered joy and happiness in God’s Word. Fr. Chito Dimaranan, SDB

 

REFLECTION QUESTIONS: How do you uphold the Word of God in your life? Or do you even read God’s Word at all?

 

Father God, give me the thirst and the hunger for Your Word and may I live it according to Your will.