Don't Be Afraid

 

 The Catholic Times View from the Ark gives the readers of the column some advice in overcoming difficulties growing up in not the best of circumstances. The columnist is working in the field of mass media and is a volunteer teacher of catechumens.

When he was a teenager, he was always hungry and tired due to the absence of his father. He had a strong desire for achievement and did well in his studies. He persistently tried to overcome reality. Nothing was accomplished smoothly.  

He entered college by luck, and could only get a job four years after graduating. It was the same even after joining the company. He felt like he was 50 meters behind the starting line of a 100-meter race. And deep down, there was always fear. He couldn't put it into words, but there was a hidden feeling of anxiety. He tried to soothe the fear by hanging out with friends and drinking, but couldn't hide it by lying to himself.

Even when middle-aged and doing well, he had nightmares. In his dreams, he was struggling to make a living after failing to graduate from middle school or was devastated because he couldn't find the test site or couldn't study at all when the exam day was near. Only those who experience the feeling of despair and tears in a dream will know the relief that comes upon waking up. 

He thought these dreams were due to his unprotected youth, a desire to achieve greater than his abilities. He didn't know that fear was a spiritual longing. At that time, he was wandering spiritually and did not know it. That thirst and loneliness led to fear and anxiety. God was not in his life. 

He was baptized in 2013. At that time, his daughter, a senior in high school, was working to pass the Catholic admissions process at Sogang University. He followed his wife and attended Sunday Mass as a ‘foot believer.’ There was no joy in the Mass or meeting Jesus. The place where Jesus should be was filled with worldly goals, children, and money. Then he faced the greatest hardship of his life. He got involved in a ridiculous incident and found himself in a situation where everything he had achieved in life fell apart. He had to endure humiliation and insults. Jesus came to him at a time when he could not survive without drinking or taking medicine.

He attended Mass almost every day, and whenever he had time, he went to the church for adoration and Eucharist and volunteered to serve the early morning Mass on Mondays. Early in the morning on a harsh winter day, he heard the voice of Jesus on the way to the parish church in the darkness: "Take courage. grow. Do not be afraid." (Matthew 14:27) He felt the pain of Jesus being betrayed by his disciples and ridiculed by the people as his pain. He could not hide the tears that flowed at the pain of Jesus 2000 years ago. 

Jesus was calling out to him: "It is I, it is I" but he could not hear. He did not feel Him or notice Him. He was afraid, anxious, and hungry. He lived an individual life, seeing only himself, without seeing Him who is whole and united. Although he did achieve some level of achievement through his will and effort, deep inside, there was always fear and anxiety.

In the new year, he wants to live a life with Him, a life in imitation of Him. As we live individual lives, we must always compete and consume other life forms to sustain life. Even within such individuality, there is a desire for the whole and unity, the attribute of God. The moment he realizes, and feels, that God is within him, fear disappears. Just as Jesus spoke to Peter 2,000 years ago, he speaks to him, now struggling in the water here in Gwangju. "Take courage. grow. Do not be afraid."

Maryknoll in Korea

In the recent issue of the Catholic Peace Weekly the Director of the Incheon Church History Research Institute will publish a collection of profiles summarizing the activities of the Maryknoll Mission  Society in the islands of the West Sea in the Incheon Diocese of Korea.

This is to look back on the lives of missionaries who practiced love for God and neighbors and to use them as examples for evangelization. The collection is scheduled to be published in the first half of this year.

Father Choi Benedict (B. Zweber, 1932-2001), who was called the ‘Schweitzer of the West Coast’, was a person who used an old military ship in 1964 and toured remote islands in the converted hospital ship ‘Star of the Sea’, caring for patients for free. Three years later, he was appointed to the parish of Deokjeokdo Island,  opened a hospital, and installed electricity and water for the island residents.

To revive the memories of these forgotten missionary priests, the Incheon Church History Research Institute is collecting missionary-related materials owned by parishioners. Items include: Photos showing missionary activities (pastoral ministry, social welfare, architecture, fellowship, etc.) — Publications (all missionary-related materials such as funeral books, prayer books, parish newsletters, or newspaper articles, testimonies, architectural drawings, blueprints) Missionary keepsakes, etc.

In the early 1960s, when the diocese was established, many refugees from North Korea lived in the West Sea islands. As a large population suddenly gathered on a small island, medical, welfare, and educational infrastructure was lacking. Maryknoll missionaries devoted themselves to spreading the gospel and improving the living conditions of the residents.

While Father Choi Benedict devoted himself to human needs, Father Michael Jeon (M. Bransfield, 1929-1989), the maternal grandson of the founder of Miller Beer in the United States, participated in projects to increase farm income and rural mechanization to help Ganghwa Island residents become self-reliant.  

In 1966, he started a pig coop on the island by importing 15 landrace (Danish breed) pigs and selling them to local believers and residents at half the market price each time they had new litters. He took care of the people of the West Sea islands both physically and financially, including purchasing threshing machines and cultivators and distributing them to other mission station residents

Father Jin Pil-se (J.P. Sinnott, 1929-2014), who was the first pastor of Yeongjong Parish in 1965, established the ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus Yeongjong Hospital’ and provided free medical care. Reclamation projects were also carried out on land devastated by the Korean War. He also devoted himself to the human rights movement and tried to publicize that the People's Revolutionary Party incident under the Yushin regime was fabricated. 

Father Buyeong-bal E. Moffett (1922-1986) was appointed as the first pastor of Baengnyeong Island Parish in 1959 and served as pastor for 14 years. He renovated the warehouse and used it as a temporary parish church, he built a nursery, a nursing home, and the 'Blessed Andrea Kim (Taegon) Hospital'.

The Incheon Church History Research Institute expressed concern about not wanting to lose memories of these years: "Relics and records of missionaries are at risk of disappearing due to population decline and aging in the West Sea island region."

Economic development has been extraordinary in Korea, a well-known fact. Also, the welfare level of Korea's help for the poor, sick, and disabled has improved greatly and will continue to improve. The Korea of 70 years ago is now just a memory. 

Coexistence

A philosophy professor at a Catholic university gives the readers of the Catholic Peace Weekly some thoughts on Symbiosis in the Diagnosis of the Times Column.

Recent life science has revealed that all living things on Earth arose from a single origin, and accordingly, the mechanisms that form those living things also function according to the same principles. Of course, understanding these facts about the origin of life in connection with God's creation is a naturalistic error and should be avoided. However, the task of reflecting on the principles of understanding and respecting life by philosophically interpreting these facts is a separate matter.

It was Lynn Margulis who revealed this scientific fact. According to this theory, called the theory of symbiosis, all life on Earth is not a single life form, but rather a more complex life form by combining various life forms and living together. There are more microorganisms living in our bodies than there are cells, and without them, our bodies would not function properly. In addition to immune and digestive functions, intestinal microorganisms have an impact that cannot be ignored, even on our emotions and intelligence.

Without them, we cannot exist as living things. Moreover, the phenomenon of symbiosis is not simply limited to the inside of an organism but is also a fact that applies to the entire living world. Not only individual life but also all of life, lives "together". It is a very narrow view of the world as a relationship of struggle and competition simply because individual life forms require other life forms to maintain themselves. In that sense, Social Darwinism, which explains evolution as a process in which the strong survive, is clearly wrong.

No life can validly live as life without other living things and without relationships with them. The relationship is never one-sided. Competition and strife are inevitable in the process of our lives, but they are just one aspect of the process of living things to live together. A story illustrates this fact well in the children's fable "Alice in Wonderland" written by Lewis Carroll. Heavy rain poured down on the village where the animals lived, and everyone got soaked. They decided to run to dry their wet bodies and offered a reward for the best runner. After running for a while, they all stopped running for their bodies were dry. Then, while arguing about who should receive the prize, the Dodo Bird says: Since we are all dry, we all win. "Everyone should get an award."

Competition and strife are inevitable in the society where people live. However, all of this is nothing more than the process that occurs in living together and ultimately moving towards a better life. The church systematizes this fact into teachings about the common good. It is clear that the virtue most lacking in our society is an understanding of the common good, and that it is one of the fundamental causes of a culture of disregard for life.

My life cannot exist without the vitality of other living beings. Only when we practice the principle of living together beyond the microscopic competition and struggle and promote the concept of the common good, can the culture of respect for life be properly established. As Christians, are we not the signs that declare and prove that the kingdom of God has already come into this world but we are not able to experience its presence? The task of Christians towards this is clearly to practice the principle of coexistence that respects and preserves life in the modern world. The transition to a culture of life will then be possible.

Giving Meaning to Life

The Catholic Peace Weekly has an article by a priest with a doctorate in pastoral counseling and now presently working as a counseling psychologist. He is devoted to presenting a holistic life direction in which daily life and religious life are not separated but integrated. 

An old couple came to visit him. The wife said that her husband has been depressed and irritable lately and that she would like him to give him some help.  Mr. Lee looked like he had been dragged along reluctantly. It wasn't a big problem, he said, but he scolded his wife for making a fuss and bothering the busy priest. However, as if he could not resist his wife's persuasion, he soon confessed his concerns.

"Father, I don’t have a smile these days. I had a prostate cancer procedure 4 years ago, and although the procedure went well, I am worried because my PSA (prostate cancer tumor marker) has not returned to normal. The doctor who operated on me said that there is nothing to worry about because prostate cancer is a good cancer and if left untreated, you can live for another 10 to 20 years. They say that if  I die during that time, I will not die from this disease but from a different disease, so there is no reason to be anxious.

"But I'm so depressed right now. No matter how beautiful the scenery is, I can't feel any joy in the thought. 'Those mountains and plants will still be alive even after 10 or 100 years, but I will soon be leaving this world.' So, I've been working out at the gym for 4 or 5 hours these days, but this depression doesn't go away. I even tried dancing at a club where the elderly gather but it was no use.

"I have worked hard up until now, raised all my children well, and now have enough to live well, so I feel so wronged and resentful that I have contracted this disease. I don't know why I want to live like this. I have lived 70 years of my life, so I have lived enough.”

Obsession and desire for life are natural to us humans. How can anxiety and fear for the rest of life be the only emotion felt by Mr. Lee? How would my life change if I was told by a doctor that I had only a few months or weeks to live? Can we truly prepare for death by feeling the preciousness of the present and being grateful for the rest of our lives? Or will we live in pain and helplessness, feeling fear and fear for the short time we have left in our lives? Although we will not die right away like Mr.Lee, just anticipating death can make our lives depressing and helpless. I wonder where the power to transcend death and live happily ever after comes from.

We already know that death anxiety can be overcome with meaning in life. However, only a few people can say with confidence what meaning their life actually has. What anyone can say with confidence is that, at least, I have raised a normal family, had children, raised them well, and have done my best to make a living. 

However, it seems that the great meaning of life was not felt. Could it be that he thought that his life had to be plausible to have some meaning? It is not that I have made a great contribution to the world, nor have I lived a life of great service and love for others.

The meaning of life may not be as grand as others think. Just living each day with joy and gratitude in God and practicing small acts of love is of great significance to believers. Mother Teresa once said, “We cannot have great love, but we can make small loves great.” The meaning of the nun's life was a small life of love that God viewed as great even though it seemed insignificant in human terms.

He concludes with the words that if Mr. Lee who has worked hard to serve God could discover the meaning of ordinary love in his life, he would be able to recover more joy in everyday life. He thinks that perhaps the feelings of anxiety and depression we feel in the face of death are a spiritual message from God that we should live the rest of our lives loving on a deeper level.

 

Word of God Sunday

This year's 'Word of God Sunday', which will be celebrated in St Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope Francis on Sunday 21 January 2024, the motto chosen is taken from the Gospel of St John: "Remain in my Word" (John 8,31).

‘Open Their Hearts’ is the title of Pope Francis’s motu proprio establishing Word of God Sunday. Let us savor the scene where Jesus appeared to his disciples, opened their hearts, and helped them understand the Bible. In commemoration of Word of God Sunday, the Pope hopes that you will once again open the Bible anew and open your heart to the image of Jesus within it. 

A journalist for the Catholic Times in its recent issue  gives us some thoughts on the Word of God Sunday. 

She often meets believers living a religious life by diligently engaging with the Word through reading or copying the Bible. A person who has read the entire Bible more than 100 times including transcription, a person who participated in a reading group and heard the entire Bible from others despite being visually impaired, a person who worked as a volunteer at a Bible club as a couple and said that they only talked about the Bible at the dinner table, etc. … .

 

What impressed her the most was the elderly man who said he had read the Bible over 100 times. He, who had a cheerful personality and was good at telling stories, said: "If you just open the Bible, Jesus says ‘love’ and ‘loving,’ so how can you hate people?" What they all had in common was the inner power that the Word has when it seeps into their lives.

 

In celebration of Word of God Sunday, we looked into the life of Saint Jerome, who left us the Vulgate Bible. A saint who can be called a ‘man of the Bible’ emphasizes the importance of the Word in living as a Christian. We encourage them to ‘never let the Bible fall from their hands’ and to ‘read the Bible often and learn everything they can while doing their best.’ He accepted the Bible as the Word of God. 

The interpretation is that the enormous amount of translations, research on the Bible text, and writing of many Bible commentaries came from such confidence and faith in the Bible.

One-third of the world's population is familiar with the Bible and believes that it is the Word of God we have many others that know about the Bible and some times do a better job in doing what it teaches.

 

A Clean Green Environment

A religious sister in the Catholic Times View from the Ark column wants all of us to direct our attention to a clean, green environment. 

As she welcomes in the new year of 2024, she remembers New Year's morning at the senior welfare facility where she worked a few years ago. It was established on a small hill surrounded by forests, a small comfort zone in a small town with a predominantly elderly population. 

One New Year's morning, the moment she opened the front door of the convent to go to the nursing home, wow! The entire world was covered with a white blanket of snow. She picked up a broom because she needed to make a path to the nursing home, but hesitated for a moment because it felt like she was damaging the New Year's gift that God had given her.

She brought up the subject in a group meeting— "The environment and the Earth are getting hotter, so shouldn’t we save Mother Earth?" The moment she boldly expressed her opinion, many participants sympathized and did not hesitate to support her. Then the discussion began and the results were reached. The opinions of "We should do something, let’s do it, reduce its use, and the like were overwhelming, but there was no concrete  resolve on what to do." Although the results were not as good as expected, the disappointment was alleviated by the fact that the awareness of ‘environmental protection’ was planted in people’s minds.

The natural environment that God gave to mankind cannot be maintained by enjoying it to our heart's content, as we received it for free out of love for people. However, there is still a lack of action on how to use and preserve it well.

Although we have raised our voices to reduce disposable containers, disposable cups, plates, and cutlery, they are piled up in homes, parishes, various stores, and even at national events. This is because it is convenient with their use and inconvenient and difficult without their use. We are conflicted between convenience and inconvenience. Perhaps a bigger reason is that you don't feel like you're destroying the environment by using disposable utensils, and you don't immediately see changes in the environment if you don't use them. Sometimes it feels like the efforts of countless environmental defenders, environmental activists, and zero waste practitioners, as well as the efforts of the movement to protect our common home through activities at the parish, are meaningless.

"I brought you into this fertile land to eat its fruit and its good things. But you have come in here and defiled my land and made my inheritance an abomination" (Jer 2:7).

It was as if God's wrath was digging into his heart. You have told us to take good care of the creations you have given us, but we must deeply reflect on whether we, the people, are just being seduced by convenience and less effort and are trying to ignore our duty to protect and care for the environment. When we look ahead to the future in the next few years, it is bleak. She is afraid because she cannot let go of the thought that the day will inevitably come when we pass on a miserable environment to generations to come.

The demands of market consumers and multinational companies for renewable energy have now become a global trend, but it cannot be denied that our society is not yet keeping up with the demands. Even if policies to deal with climate change are left to the government, we must continue to make small efforts to protect our common home through environmental preservation campaigns. Together, we must once again strive to create a ‘clean, green society’ where life and joy coexist in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner even in cramped urban spaces.

Living With Less and Lacking Nothing

 

The Catholic Peace Weekly in its Faith Platform Column, reminds the readers of another time in Korea not that many years ago, experienced by a child now a housewife.

She mentions the days when her parents were poor and were entertaining guests at the noon meal the guests would leave food in their bowls for the hosts who they knew were not eating. The starving hosts were giving up their food for the guests. When she tells her child these stories about a time when food was rare, he frowns and says: “Why?”

She recently raised a family of three at her parents' home. Her parents, who had precious memories and were thrifty and didn't know how to throw away things, had every corner of their house filled with memorable items. For three generations to live together in one space, we had to throw away a lot, and every time we tried to throw it away, there was friction with her parents.

My mother, who has experienced poverty and abundance, is still thrifty. She recycles bags of coffee mix to store salt. We always recycle disposables, fold leaflets into pot holders, and make wallets out of stretched socks. Shopping bags are stuck in every crevice of the furniture, waiting to be used again. Sometimes you are creative, and sometimes desperate.

“Today, the school told me to throw away my textbooks, so I threw them away.” 

“Hey, that’s strange, why are you throwing away your textbooks?”

“I’ve learned everything now.”

As she writes this, she recalls the conversation between her daughter and grandfather. Who said he didn't have money to buy books, and wonders why they throw away good textbooks when the children haven't even graduated yet.

We live in an age where convenience is greatly esteemed. When she sees advertisements for quick delivery of online services, or to buy goods at prices much lower than the market price, she is living a life where she can consume more, more quickly, and throw it away more easily. She worries that she'll get used to this way of living. This is because the more widespread the perception that ‘it’s cheap, use it, and if you don’t like it,  return it, the more the earth will inevitably suffer. These days, as irresponsible consumption and disposal become easier the Earth will suffer. We need to learn to wisely coexist with the Earth.

She thinks we need to creatively incorporate the frugality that is ingrained in us from our parents, a lifestyle to which we were not attracted. It's best to carefully consider whether you really need it and whether it's durable and well-made before purchasing it, using it for a long time, and passing it on to someone who needs it rather than throwing it away or returning it.

“In the old days, everything would have been considered a treasure.” My father said something while looking at the gorgeous gift-wrapping paper. I think he’s saying: ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t throw it away, but since you guys want to live a clean life, you’ll throw it away.’ As the person in charge of throwing things away in my house, I also wonder, ‘Would it be harmful to convey my feelings if I reuse these precious packaging boxes when giving them as gifts instead of throwing them away?’

Nowadays, we have long passed the days when we looked at a guest's leftover bowl of rice and thanked him for it. Nowadays, we exchange gifts in recycled packaging, consume carefully, share and reuse items, and show our gratitude to the earth that we generously share. We have lived without serious shortcomings thanks to the Earth, so now she hopes we can live using less and lacking nothing, a way of living in which we can all come to see its charm for the sake of the Earth.