Tag Archives: inspirational stories

Black Saturday Special: Being the Light in the Darkness

Today is Black Saturday,  (in Latin, Sabbatum Sanctum), the ‘day of the entombed Christ’, is the Lord’s day of rest, for on that day Christ’s body lay in His tomb.

Ideally, Holy Saturday should be the quietest day of the year. It is a day of suspense between two worlds, that of darkness, sin and death, and that of the Resurrection and the restoration of the Light of the World.

Tonight we’ll be celebrating the night vigil of Easter that signifies Christ’s passage from the dead to the living by the liturgy. This begins in darkness (sin, death) and is enlightened by the fire and the candle representing Lumen Christi — the Light of Christ — just as the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, the community of believers, is led from spiritual darkness to the light of His truth. Christ’s baptism, which our own baptism imitates, is represented during the liturgy by the blessing of the water of baptism by immersing (“burying”) the candle representing His Body into the font.

It is with this premise that we’ve arrived at today’s Holy Saturday reflection. Continue reading →

Wholly Week Special: Free-day

Friday of Holy Week has been traditionally called Good Friday or Holy Friday. On this day, the church commemorates Jesus’ arrest, his trial, crucifixion and suffering, death, and burial. This is said to be the day that Jesus died and left us in this physical world. Some devotees even believed that physical activities that may put one’s safety at risk such as driving or even allowing the kids to play outside are not allowed today for Christ is not there to guide us.

Given these beliefs, we could say that man on this day is left alone, with his master away there’s nobody to watch upon him; in short man can be said to be free.

This is the type of freedom that we’ll be talking about today in relation to our “Free”day special. Continue reading →

Wholly Week Special: Weeds-day

Now that we’ve already established the beginning of man and reflected what it means to have our God given freedom, we’ll now delve into how we exercise this freedom in relation to how we judge others around us. We’ll be reflecting on our lives here on earth amidst the weeds that surrounds us, the weeds that could be your enemy, your friend, your lover, or you, yourself.

We’ll begin by reflecting on one of the most popular parables of today, the Parable of the Weeds.

The Parable of the Weeds

Continue reading →

Wholly Week Special: Choose-day

Yesterday we’ve begun our ‘Wholly’ Week Special with a post entitled ‘Man’day, just in time for starting our Holy Monday right.

Here, we’ve talked about the beginning of man (where the blog title ‘Man’day originated) and discussed how our characteristics are a reflection of God’s image as we are created like Him. All that we have, our talents and abilities, our senses and faculties, our strengths and weaknesses comes from Him, and it is just but proper to use these gifts for His greater glory.

Now that we’ve set the stage of the beginning of man, it is now time to proceed with the next element that man is in possession of, something that could either make or break our relationship with our Creator – our freedom. Continue reading →

Wholly Week Special: ‘Man’day

Yesterday’s Passion Sunday, more popularly known as Palm Sunday, commemorated the beginning of week-long Filipino tradition of celebrating the Holy Week and Jesus’ final agonizing journey to the cross.

To live out our Lent fruitfully, I’ve created this Wholly Week Special series of posts. Why ‘wholly’? Because the daily posts that you’ll be reading starting today have an end goal of making you ‘whole’ once again by the end of the week.

Since it’s a Monday, and April has just started, I find it a perfect time to introduce to you my latest blog page – Pray. This post will mark the beginning of another category of my adventures. This is a new challenge for me as I’m new to writing spiritual posts, from my usual travel write-ups. But hopefully you’ll be with me, as He with us, and together we’ll trek this new path of adventure.

Continue reading →

Letting Go: Don’t Look Back in Anger

There comes a time, in every relationship and journey where all the work is doing, all the trying is done, all the effort has been made – and they only choice we have is to let go.

It’s been said before: we are human BEINGS, not human DOINGS. And the more I step outside my little bubble of the TDL writing room and meet people, and see people, and feel people and hear people, the more I see that there is a collective story that if we can just get it right, that we will be enough, and when we are enough, we will FINALLY get the love, significance and joy that we want so much.

But that just ain’t how it is. Continue reading →