THANKING GOD FOR THE GIFT OF LIFE,
THE MULTI-LAYERED VOCATION AND THE MANY EXPRESSIONS OF HIS WILL.

(Homily delivered by His Eminence Gaudencio B. Cardinal Rosales during the
Mass for the Clergy Celebration and Post-Celebration of his birthday,
on August 16. 2011 at 10 a.m. at the Arzobispado de Manila. Cardinal Rosales
marked his 79th birth anniversary on August 10, 2011.)

To the Father I slowly came to know in Jesus, His Son, with the binding love of the Holy Spirit, I am totally grateful for the life He lent me, and in which I came to appreciate the many expressions of kindness in both happy and sometimes very difficult situations, conveyed through friends, brothers and sisters, parents, surrogate-parents, and priests and bishops, and the lay people who became both collaborators and friends -- all of them expressing God’s love for me. Seventy-nine years and all of the grace, even in those moments I found many gifts disguised as pains. In those seventy-nine years of life, fifty-three as priest and thirty-seven as bishop, the mysterious goodness of God placed me in different and at times very trying situations, hardly familiar to me with people whose ways are many times different from mine in culture, background and emotional language.

The priestly ministry began for me by helping young men in the seminaries to prepare themselves for the Priesthood, encouraging them to continuously seek God, His will, and to bind myself to Him in humble prayer, and to abide with others in charity.

Now I leave everything in God’s hands in the way I had accompanied those young students and priests in the discernment of God’s will in their lives, work and later ministries.

Eleven years in Bukidnon and parts of Lanao del Sur, after the Muslim uprising in the late Seventies, and the beginning of the communist-NPA rebellion in the Eighties frightened us in that part of the country where we thought there would never be an end to the killings and violence in Mindanao. But nearness to the people helped us to devise a people-rooted evangelization of communities through the Word that is Jesus. The, the BEC’s took roots where people lived and worked, and where, we, pastors, moved and grew with the people.

Ten years in Lipa gave me the common feeling with the priests and the laity that we were also one of the common searchers for the way back to the Father. As I serve with them, I, too, was encouraged by their own response to the call in Jesus in our return to our common Father. And now, in Manila, where for nearly eight years I have served, overstaying for more than four years, I depart with happy memories of having worked with brother-priests, who opened selves, with the people, to pursue a common pastoral vision. There were, of course, lost occasions where together in these past years we could have taken advantage of grace in favor of the Kingdome values that can purify weakness in our tradition and the negative elements in culture have smudged us with. And yet, we discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that we are all seeking “the same fullness in life.” We pray for real humility and mutual charity to be able to proceed to that promised, and sought for, life in Jesus.

But I remain a priest with you all, dear Brothers in Christ. In the priestly vocation and ministry, one will find many possibilities for real fulfillment in life, happiness and joy in the holiness where and what God wants us to be. On the other hand, there also are countless occasions for being completely disappointed or frustrated in one’s vocation; and all of these depend on what the priest wants after ordination.

If I had chosen the priesthood wanting to pursue a personal ambition or plotting a career succeeding my studies, I should be the most disappointed person in the world. Marked by an indelible character through the anointing of the Holy Spirit at Ordination, I know that I have been totally configured to Christ, giving up other personal options, but taking upon myself the will of Christ, that enables me to speak and act in his person.

But a priest does not build the rest of his priesthood on a personal ambition, but only on the will of God expressed by Jesus Christ through Superiors (the Bishops) in the Church. For the priest, the prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” is a prayer of surrender to God. Priestly obedience is a “crucifixion prayer” that says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” It means that I do not build the world of my own; it is the kingdom of the Father that I must sustain. The Priesthood is an answer to the crying vision and prayer of Jesus to preach and live in one’s flesh and spirit the transcendence of God who has absolutely no rival or equal in my life; it is called the Kingdom of my Father.

But that priestly prayer is a prayer of obedience to the Father. “The will of God” is, to the priest, likened to the North of the directional compass. In the compass, everything is in relation to the North (pole) of the hemisphere. The East is always in relation to the North and so is the West; South is in relation to the East and West, and is also the direct opposite of the North. Every direction is precisely what it is, because there is a North.

Everything that as a priest I choose to be, or have done, will be studied, compared with, and analyzed in relation to the North of my spiritual life -- the Will of God. The accomplished good, (if ever there were some), the praises heaped, (if ever they were deserved), the failures committed, their consequences, in my life and in the lives of others that I worked with, will always be viewed in relation to their meaning within the will of God. I thank Him, because He is a merciful God, who, in Jesus and with love, cancels every evil imputed on me, before they became another sin.

And this love teaches the priest humility and strengthens his hope. When God forgives He does not bring shame on the person; He does not humiliate, but He brings the subject to the reality about self -- that the person is weak, that the person is breakable (earthen vessel), and is actually broken (Paschal Mystery), and that He is the only one who mends us with His compassionate love. “The Lord heals the broken hearted, he binds up all their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). He humbles us to make us appreciate the love He pours on us in forgiveness.

What shame and suffering we endure today we know will be replaced by the joy and glory that come at the end where triumph crowns every form of suffering. The priest is “the first apostle of hope,” reminding the people that today’s pain will always be overcome by the hope of tomorrow. But the priest is also in today’s world, the living example of the passion of Jesus Christ, just as the Lord Jesus, in his sufferings, had brought to Himself all the sins of human kind. “If you can have some share in the sufferings of Christ, be glad, because you will enjoy a much greater gladness when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). In my prayer (I know I was not along in the experience), I had sometimes questioned my own suffering as a priest and a shepherd. But why must a priest not suffer when Jesus, the High Priest, pained to death in order to teach, to witness and to save. A true priest must suffer; and this I learned with tears from the heart, as they also welled in my eyes.

But the beauty and joy of our priestly vocation is that we are not angered by our sufferings. We may be pained by the experience, but “our priest vocation and spirituality has its roots in the experience of the Cross… that leads to the totality of the Paschal Mystery” (PDV, 45). And the Paschal Mystery’s third phase is always the Triumph of the Resurrection.

Thus, every priest is an Easter disciple; every priest is a happy person; and because of God’s love, he, the priest, is a special person of hope. I end with a very meaningful paraphrase of Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:18):

‘“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not wroth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.’ The center of gravity of existence has shifted as a result of this certainty: now it lies in the morning of life, which means that it takes away the oppressiveness and the pressure of the moment and dissolves the tears of evening by the power of a grace that lasts forever. This is precisely what Easter faith is designed to give us: the ability to look across from the evening to the morning, from the part to the whole, and thus to journey toward the joy of the redeemed that springs from that morning of the third day, which first heard the message: Christ is risen!” (Joseph Ratzinger, SEEK THAT WHICH IS ABOVE, pp 95-960.

Despite what you see in me now, regardless of what you have heard said of me now, or you yourself have muttered, I still thank the God who loves me in Jesus and that He has not allowed me to cast my eyes down where I could see only my ugly feet, in Jesus I was given the ability to look beyond the night and wait in patience for the dawn -- the Sun, Jesus for me, is rising again!

Thank you everyone, brother bishops and priests in Manila, for making the nearly eight years full of hope for you and me. God bless! Salamat po!

+gbrosales
16August 2011