During Mass at the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño last Friday, I noticed once more the young man John (not his real name), in his early 20s, who has a movement disorder. I do not personally know him or the specifics of his illness. But I have seen him many times in Cebu City churches. Often he simply participates in the Mass. At other times, he helps collect donations during the offertory.
The grace that John has obviously accepted to drive him to Mass apparently every day though he cannot help but move spasmodically is edifying. It touched me again on Friday eventide. After receiving Christ in Holy Communion, John pushed himself to kneel and pray on the hard marble floor of the basilica’s open-air pilgrim center, crazily flailing arms and out-of-control body notwithstanding.
He had every excuse to find a chair to sit on. He could have stayed on his feet for want of a cushion to ease kneeling; cheap leather handbag swinging from his cruelly bent arm. But disregarding ergonomic and physical conditions, both beyond his control, John pulled all the stops to express the worship in his heart through the bending of his knees.
Catholics and other Christians celebrate today, the last Sunday of the Church’s liturgical year, the Solemnity of Christ, the King of the Universe. Pope Pius XI instituted the great feast through the encyclical letter Quas Primas in response to the excesses of nationalism and growing secularism in 1925.
Nearly a century later, in our era of the United Nations and an overload of knowledge-that-is-power accessible via the Internet, humanity remains divided. History still is chaotic. That’s because for as long as people do not kneel as subjects of Christ the King, they will not attain unity with one another or discover the true meaning and purpose of their existence.
The wisest of earthly kings, Solomon, son of David, once said, “Better an equable person than a hero, someone with self-mastery than one who takes a city.” (Proverbs 16:32)
King Solomon would have us spurn self-styled heroism and wild ambition in favor of the virtue of temperance, of self-control. A man brimming with ego, whose lifestyle reflects the belief that he is the awesome center of the universe, will refuse to control himself or abandon his goals. He fears that someone, God included, might oust him from his throne and wreck his plan to get ahead in life.
His strength, however, is a sham. He can control individuals, families, parishes, businesses, employees, audiences, cities and nations but he does not have the least bit of control over his compulsions, anxieties and sins.
A man with self-mastery, in contrast, is just one step away from self-denial, taking up his cross and following Christ. With his ego in check, this man welcomes God’s proposals and grace after grace in his heart.
What do I want out of life, amid its unpredictable plots and sub-plots? I can choose to be no more than a law-abiding national or an hour-a-Sunday Catholic whose spending of the remainder of the week is subject only to my mood and inclinations.
Or I can choose to dream of a world where men have no more cause to compete violently with one another or subdue countries because they are working hard to overcome their self-centeredness after tasting the all-surpassing sweetness of God’s friendship.
If I choose the latter, I dream with Christ the King, and I begin fulfilling his dream with a reverence for and submission to him that are as resolute as John’s. Then I can serve Christ in the symbolic and literal hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick and imprisoned among my brethren until one day I hear him say:
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat… I was in prison and you came to visit me… Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:34-40)