perpetual help: our need for help perpetually: iloilo court personnel

Providence has willed, or was it just simply bad luck, or some bad construction, that we become neighbors.  (I'm referring to the Hall of Justice of Iloilo City which was declared a hazard after the earthquake.  The Judges are temporarily holding court at de Paul College, at the back of SVFS.)  I live just at the other side.  And like all neighbors we share a lot of things.  We share a common boundary, we share the drainage and several years ago we have to close our piggery in acknowledgement that we share the same air we breathe.  There are so many things we share and one of these, I am told are ghosts.  We share the same ghosts.  I believe these all started when the three of us were in the auditorium of SVFS discussing something.  All of a sudden, to our surprise, and I would add, shock, the curtain which is operated electronically, opened.  It just opened.  Nobody but us, but the curtains just opened.  In fact it didn’t stop after the full length opened.  The motor of the curtain just kept on going and going.  Then after a minute it stopped and all became quiet.  So in an act of bravery, I went up the dark stage and said quiet nicely, “hello, whoever you are can I please request you to stop haunting us.  Fr. Frank the superior (then) of De Paul is a good priest and he is very friendly, so can you please, all of you, transfer to De Paul.”  I never heard from them since, so I presume they heeded my request. 

If there are things that are quite irritating in life, these are the things we can never have full control of, and that includes to some people ghosts.  I mean, how do you treat a ghost, or worst how do you treat an infestation of ghosts.  Sometimes people would come to me to do just that - drive them away.  But if these ghosts would not even leave a chapel where mass is held every day, what could and what would a priest do?

This is just one of those events in our life when we can be so helpless.  In this instance, a helplessness we can laugh about.  But there are times in life when our helplessness can really be unnerving, even depressing and sometimes even fatal.  All of us might have experienced this one time or the other - what will I do, where will I go, to whom shall I come to?

Today we celebrate the feast of our patroness, Our Mother of Perpetual Help.  We look to Mary as the source of our help and not just a help that comes once in a while but a perpetual help.  We acknowledge that we have a mother that will always help us, we have someone whom we can constantly depend on, that we can always approach and run to in our needs.

More than this however, and I would like to emphasize this, is the celebration of the underlying reality about ourselves.  When we look to Mary as our Perpetual Help we are in effect acknowledging that we are perpetually in need of help.  When we celebrate her as our Perpetual Help, it is an acknowledgement too that we are in need of constant help, that we are in perpetual need of help. It is not just that help is provided perpetually, it is also - our need for help is perpetual, it knows no end, for as long as we are here.

We are many times helpless, unable to fend for ourselves.  We need many times to acknowledge our helplessness, our inability to control things.  We need to acknowledge our need for one another to get things done.  And above all, we need to acknowledge our need for the help that comes from on high. 

Many times we think we are powerful.  Many times we even become drunk with power.  Many times we think and even believe that we can do things solely on our own.  We think and we believe until something in our life snaps.

If you are not aware yet, one of your neighbours and ours too is a home which we priest call the home sweet home.  It is there too in the seminary.  It is the home for our retired priests.  Sometimes we call it, of course behind the backs of the occupants, a pre-departure area.  It is the home now of men who were once powerful in the church, now they cannot even hold up their pajamas.  It is the home now of men who were once in full control of everything in their life and even in the lives of people in their parish, now they are no longer in control even just of their bladder.  Precisely we call it our pre-departure area because before we go back home to heaven, the God our Father, we are first made to relearn helplessness and with it to relearn dependence, we need to re-learn living in constant need of help so that we can recover that child-like attitude of trust.

Our first reading tells the story of Ahaz about to be conquered by the more powerful enemy Israel allied with Syria.  Our second reading tells of a woman about to be snatched and devoured by the dragon.  And yet in the end God helped them, God saved them.  In their helplessness God intervened.

There comes a time in our own personal lives and in the life of our nation when we become too trusting with ourselves, too trusting with what our capacities can bring us, too trusting with what our abilities can achieve for us.  But remember what happened to Lucifer when he refused to put himself under God’s control, thus falling from the sky, or Adam and Eve thinking that they will come better acquiring knowledge independent of God’s guidance and help; or the people of the tower of Babel wanting to reach heaven on their own without God’s help.  Our efforts fail when God is not involved, when we think so highly of ourselves, and when we rely solely on our own power. Left on our own, we are nothing.

This is not just a celebration of Mary as Perpetual Help.  This too is a celebration of our dependence on God, this is a celebration of our trust in God’s power.  Mary is our perpetual help for we are perpetually in need of help.