Early this morning I called up my wife Marilene and she sang a birthday song and some other love songs for me. I went to work and my colleagues including the owner of the company greeted me Happy Birthday. When I came home I spent time viewing the greetings that family and friends sent me. I just finished having a long internet chat with my wife and I am so glad that she is there for me on this special day. Last year I can still recall that I celebrated my birthday in my hometown of Cabatuan, Iloilo, Philippines. I was still wearing a monk's cowl then and I was still in the ministerial priesthood. I celebrated Mass at the church with family, former teachers, classmates, relatives and friends. Then, a party was given at Huesca St. Then a month later I expressed my decision to leave priesthood and get married. The marriage took place in Manila last December 8,2007 and our wedding pictures got published in http://www.cabatuan.com/ Just recently my wife Marilene went home to Cabatuan for the Fiesta celebration last September 10,2008. She was very glad to make that trip and have a break from her busy office schedule in Manila. She stayed in my room in Huesca St. during her stay and she visited and came to know my family, relatives and friends there. As I celebrate my birthday today, I cannot help but pause for a moment and take a good look at my life, this gift of life that God has given me. All I could sum up saying is that God is love. Everything that had happened in my life, since I was born into this world is an expression of the love of God. St. Ignatius of Loyola in the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises highly wrote of the necessity to have this conviction and assurance of being loved by God unconditionally. In my growing up years and adult life I experienced the love of God in all aspects, especially in those very trying moments of powerlessness over areas of unmanageability and lostness of self wherein I found myself stucked in the morass of self pity, guilt, fear and anger. In the cry of Jesus on the cross, " My God, my God, why have you forsakened me? " I have found the meaning and purpose of all my pains and sufferings in life. The blessed Pope John Paul II wrote that in that very moment Jesus was expressing both the human and divine cry of anguish. In the human side, Jesus identified with the very totality of the pains of humanity and cried the same cry and asked the same question, " Why? " His human cry was also my very own at very significant and deep painful situations of my life, which is an experience of hopelessness and wasteland of abandonment. On the other hand, the divine cry for help is a sigh of surrender, of acceptance of pain as the touchstone of spiritual transformation, of the courage to let go and let God and of the willingness to die in order to live. Today as I celebrate my birthday, I am very aware and conscious that as I totally surrender to God in the divine order of things, I have chosen to die to my old self which is tired, exhausted and disgruntled and I have made a conscious and responsible decision to live my new life of freedom from the bondage of self, of victory over my human weaknesses and imperfections and of joy for having found my true vocation in life, to live as an ordinary and simple man, loving and caring for my wife and our family and fostering our spiritual growth together as husband and wife. Today I am spiritually awakened that the best way to celebrate one's gift of life is to go inside my own self and find my reason for living. In the book, Beginning to Pray, Archbishop Anthony Bloom, the author, was interviewed by Timothy Wilson. At one point Timothy Wilson asked him, " Your father sounds to have been an extraordinary man. Can you remember very much about him? " To this question, came his touching and thought provoking reply, " I remember a certain number of his phrases. In fact there are two things he said which impressed me and have stayed with me all my life. One is about life. I remember he said to me after a holiday, ' I worried about you ' and I said, ' Did you think I'd had an accident? ' He said, " That would have meant nothing, even if you had been killed. I thought you had lost your integrity. ' Then on another occasion he said to me, ' Always remember that whether you are alive or dead matters nothing. What matters is what you live for and what you are prepared to die for.' These things were the background of my early education and show the sense of life that I got from him. " Today as I think seriously about my life I can well say that when I got married to Marilene T. Lusaya last year I had my date with destiny in the face of a tired, exhausted and distraught world where men continue to fight and hate each other even in the name of religion, where most political leaders continue to be corrupt and religious institutions continue to lose their grip of being the conscience of the human condition of misery, injustice, sickness and death. Indeed, when I got out of priesthood and got married I simultaneously declared my freedom to seek the God of my own understanding and experience and know that still I am loved, blessed and provided with the grace and strength to move on and discover untapped vistas of my spiritual search for my true meaning and purpose in life. I have found my wife Marilene to be the very reason for me to live my life to the fullest, in joy and serenity with her as we trudge the road of life hand in hand and hearts forged into one towards the stars of our greater destiny as a couple God designed and meant us to be. To end, let me quote a classic Latin verse, " Omnia Vincit Amor " which means " Love conquers all ". I also thought of this today and for me when there is true love and devotion there is no difficulty that cannot be surpassed, there is no conflict that cannot be resolved, there is no dream that cannot be realized, there is no doubt that cannot be relinquished and there is no happiness that cannot be fulfilled. On my birthday today, I have found out and deeply felt that life is a celebration not just on the day of one's birth but that in each moment of each day life in all its wonder, beauty, grandeur, drama and giftedness can be truly relished, tasted and enjoyed together especially in married life.
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